Search Strategies and Specifications in a Swarm versus Swarm Context

Robotica ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Ali Moltajaei Farid ◽  
Md Abdus Samad Kamal ◽  
Simon Egerton

SUMMARY This paper proposes and evaluates swarming mechanisms of patrolling unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that can collectively search a region for intruding UAVs. The main contributions include the development of multi-objective searching strategies and investigation of the required sensor configurations for the patrolling UAVs. Numerical results reveal that it is sometimes better to search through a region with a single swarm rather than multiple swarms deployed over sub-regions. Moreover, a large communication range does not necessarily improve search performances, and the patrolling swarm must have a speed close to the speed of the intruding UAVs to maximize the search performances.

Author(s):  
Mohammad Khairul Habib Pulok ◽  
Uttam K. Chakravarty

Abstract Unmanned aerial vehicles are applicable in a lot of areas including weather condition monitoring, surveillance, and reconnaissance. They need further development in design, especially, for the turbulent atmospheric conditions. Smart materials are considered for wing manufacturing for gust alleviation whereas membranes are found suitable for such applications, and therefore, analyzing aerodynamic properties of the membrane is important. Wind gusts create an abrupt atmospheric situation for unmanned aerial vehicles during the flight. In this study, a continuous gust profile and two types of stochastic gust models, i.e., Dryden gust model and von Karman gust model are developed to study the effects of gust load on a flexible membrane wing. One of the promising ways to reduce the effects of the gust is by using an electroactive membrane wing. A fluid-structure-interaction model by coupling the finite element model of the membrane and computational fluid dynamics model of the surrounding airflow is generated. Aerodynamic coefficients are calculated from the forces found from the numerical results for different gust velocities. A wind-tunnel experimental setup is used to investigate the aerodynamic responses of the membrane wing. Dryden gust model and von Karman gust model are found comparable with a minimum variation of magnitude in the gust velocity profile. The coefficients of lift and drag fluctuate significantly with the change in velocity due to wind gust. A validation of the fluid-structure-interaction model is performed by comparing the numerical results for the lift and drag coefficients with the experimental results. The outcome of this study contributes to better understand the aerodynamics and maneuverability of unmanned aerial vehicles in the gust environment.


Aerospace ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (6) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Victor Gomez ◽  
Nicolas Gomez ◽  
Jorge Rodas ◽  
Enrique Paiva ◽  
Maarouf Saad ◽  
...  

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are affordable these days. For that reason, there are currently examples of the use of UAVs in recreational, professional and research applications. Most of the commercial UAVs use Px4 for their operating system. Even though Px4 allows one to change the flight controller structure, the proportional-integral-derivative (PID) format is still by far the most popular choice. A selection of the PID controller parameters is required before the UAV can be used. Although there are guidelines for the design of PID parameters, they do not guarantee the stability of the UAV, which in many cases, leads to collisions involving the UAV during the calibration process. In this paper, an offline tuning procedure based on the multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) algorithm for the attitude and altitude control of a Px4-based UAV is proposed. A Pareto dominance concept is used for the MOPSO to find values for the PID comparing parameters of step responses (overshoot, rise time and root-mean-square). Experimental results are provided to validate the proposed tuning procedure by using a quadrotor as a case study.


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