COORDINATION AND CONTROL EXPERIMENTS FOR UAV TEAMS

摘要

This paper introduces two unique testbeds that have recently been developed at MIT to demonstrate the coordination and control of teams of multiple autonomous vehicles. The first testbed uses eight rovers and four blimps operated indoors to emulate a heterogeneous fleet of vehicles that could be used to perform a search and rescue mission. The second testbed uses eight 60-scale model aircraft that are flown autonomously using a commercially available autopilot. This combination of testbeds provides platforms for both advanced research and realistic demonstrations of control for autonomous multivehicle systems. This paper focuses on testbed demonstrations of these algorithms and a new receding horizon approach to task assignment that was designed to obtain a good tradeoff between computation time and performance. Typical results of the algorithms are presented for representative experiments, including an in- flight demonstration of receding horizon control on the UAV testbed.