Teleoperation of Cooperative Control of Multiple Heterogeneous Slave Unmanned Aerial Vehicles via a Single Master Subsystem for Multi-Task Multi-Target Scenarios

摘要

This paper proposes a control method to remotely operate cooperative multiple heterogeneous slave unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) via a single master robot to perform different tasks on different targets in one mission. The UAV team is formed by different automated aircrafts. They are equipped with a vehicle-task-target pairing algorithm to be assigned their proper tasks and targets when moving in a leader-follower formation to track and perform assigned targets and tasks, respectively. The proposed leader-follower formation control method is modified based on a potential field algorithm to guide the UAV team or sub-team. In the UAV team, only a single leader vehicle is teleoperated by a human operator while all other follower vehicles autonomously form the formation regarding the leader movement. Therefore, the number of long distance transmission links between UAVs is reduced to minimize the possibility of occurrences of large communication delays. Besides, the vehicle-task-target pairing algorithm is derived from the proven auction algorithm for a multi-task multi-target case, which optimizes effects-based vehicle-task-target pairing based on a heuristic algorithm. The pairing method for the vehicle-task-target pairing is developed to produce a weighted attack guidance table (WAGT), which includes the benefits of assignments of robotic combinations (subteams) to tasks and targets. Therefore, the optimal robot-task-target pairs are computed based on WAGT with the heuristic algorithm. Finally, comparative simulation studies are performed to illustrate efficacy of the proposed teleoperated UAV team for multi-task multi-target scenarios to highlight the improvement of the teleoperation of the UAVs in terms of task efficiency.