Collaborative Autonomous Unmanned Aerial - Ground Vehicle Systems for Field Operations

摘要

A heterogeneous UAV-UGV system with adaptable operational procedures/protocols for asset coordination, cooperation, decision-making, efficient communication and processing between its assets, meeting mission objectives is modeled and evaluated experimentally, by simulation and using prototype systems. The research has resulted in (i) Development of a processing system for UGVs/UAVs that incorporate an on-board processing vision systems using low cost and highly adaptable motherboards meeting strict payload capabilities of miniature aerial vehicles and ground vehicles, including building and testing of four UGVs and one unmanned helicopter that utilize this system; (ii) Development of a proposed FPGA based autopilot design that allows for future system improvements by providing an easily programmed, dedicated hardware platform that will work with extremely small payload capacity vehicles and compliment the existing system by removing tight timing requirements for low level controls and data acquisition from the existing processing system; (iii) Designing and testing decentralized PID and fuzzy logic, LQR, and model predictive controllers for small unmanned helicopters; (iv) Testing and implementing in hardware UGVs as heterogeneous swarms not maintaining one particular formation but having the ability to modify formation in the event of member or configuration loss, or addition of new team member; (v) Incorporating MANET technology to allow a group of vehicles to extend the area of coverage by relying information from distant sources to the main station through 'routing' vehicles; (vi) Development of localization techniques and vision based navigation; (vii) Development of a proposed design for a UGV based mobile landing platform along with an analysis of available batteries and power requirements that led to recommendations for improvement of the endurance.