scholarly journals Autonomous Integrity Monitoring for Relative Navigation of Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (8) ◽  
pp. 1483
Author(s):  
Yuan Sun

Accurate and reliable relative navigation is the prerequisite to guarantee the effectiveness and safety of various multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) cooperation tasks, when absolute position information is unavailable or inaccurate. Among the UAV navigation techniques, Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) is widely used due to its worldwide coverage and simplicity in relative navigation. However, the observations of GNSS are vulnerable to different kinds of faults arising from transmission degradation, ionospheric scintillations, multipath, spoofing, and many other factors. In an effort to improve the reliability of multi-UAV relative navigation, an autonomous integrity monitoring method is proposed with a fusion of double differenced GNSS pseudoranges and Ultra Wide Band (UWB) ranging units. Specifically, the proposed method is designed to detect and exclude the fault observations effectively through a consistency check algorithm in the relative positioning system of the UAVs. Additionally, the protection level for multi-UAV relative navigation is estimated to evaluate whether the performance meets the formation flight and collision avoidance requirements. Simulated experiments derived from the real data are designed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method in autonomous integrity monitoring for multi-UAV relative navigation.

2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoxuan Hu ◽  
Jing Cheng ◽  
He Luo

This paper considers a task assignment problem for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The UAVs are set to perform attack tasks on a collection of ground targets in a severe uncertain environment. The UAVs have different attack capabilities and are located at different positions. Each UAV should be assigned an attack task before the mission starts. Due to uncertain information, many criteria values essential to task assignment were random or fuzzy, and the weights of criteria were not precisely known. In this study, a novel task assignment approach based on stochastic Multicriteria acceptability analysis (SMAA) method was proposed to address this problem. The uncertainties in the criteria were analyzed, and a task assignment procedure was designed. The results of simulation experiments show that the proposed approach is useful for finding a satisfactory assignment under severe uncertain circumstances.


Author(s):  
Khan Muhammad Shehzad ◽  
Hao Su ◽  
Gong-You Tang ◽  
Bao-Lin Zhang

This paper deals with the optimal formation control problem based on model decomposition for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The main contribution of this paper is to integrate the formation control and the trajectory tracking into one unified feedforward control and feedback control framework in an optimal mode. We first establish the dynamic model of the leader-follower UAV formation system, and the communication network topology which only depends on the position information given by the leader. Second, to reduce the complexity of the model, each follower is decomposed into three isolated subsystems. Third, a step-by-step formation controller design scheme decomposed into feedforward control and optimal control of formation control is proposed. Finally, the proposed scheme has been extensively simulated and the results demonstrate the stability and the optimality.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 27
Author(s):  
Amjaad Alhaqbani ◽  
Heba Kurdi ◽  
Kamal Youcef-Toumi

The challenge concerning the optimal allocation of tasks across multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (multi-UAVs) has significantly spurred research interest due to its contribution to the success of various fleet missions. This challenge becomes more complex in time-constrained missions, particularly if they are conducted in hostile environments, such as search and rescue (SAR) missions. In this study, a novel fish-inspired algorithm for multi-UAV missions (FIAM) for task allocation is proposed, which was inspired by the adaptive schooling and foraging behaviors of fish. FIAM shows that UAVs in an SAR mission can be similarly programmed to aggregate in groups to swiftly survey disaster areas and rescue-discovered survivors. FIAM’s performance was compared with three long-standing multi-UAV task allocation (MUTA) paradigms, namely, opportunistic task allocation scheme (OTA), auction-based scheme, and ant-colony optimization (ACO). Furthermore, the proposed algorithm was also compared with the recently proposed locust-inspired algorithm for MUTA problem (LIAM). The experimental results demonstrated FIAM’s abilities to maintain a steady running time and a decreasing mean rescue time with a substantially increasing percentage of rescued survivors. For instance, FIAM successfully rescued 100% of the survivors with merely 16 UAVs, for scenarios of no more than eight survivors, whereas LIAM, Auction, ACO and OTA rescued a maximum of 75%, 50%, 35% and 35%, respectively, for the same scenarios. This superiority of FIAM performance was maintained under a different fleet size and number of survivors, demonstrating the approach’s flexibility and scalability.


Author(s):  
Yaohong Qu ◽  
Feng Zhang ◽  
Renneng Gu ◽  
Dongli Yuan

Based on the locations of several unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and the pseudo ranges to a target, a target cooperative location method is proposed in this paper. The nonlinear equation about real pseudo distance information is transformed to another equation by using Tayloy formula. By solving the above equation, position information of the target can be obtained. Meanwhile, the certain equation's variables are the measured results of pseudo distances, location errors of UAVs and distance-measuring errors of range sensors. Besides, an online enumeration method is applied to search for the best formation, whose objective is to enhance the location accuracy, and the mentioned formation is mapped to the minimal GDOP. The simulations verify the validity and adaptability of the proposed method.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (7) ◽  
pp. 2400
Author(s):  
Ziyong Zhang ◽  
Xiaoling Xu ◽  
Jinqiang Cui ◽  
Wei Meng

This paper is concerned with relative localization-based optimal area coverage placement using multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). It is assumed that only one of the UAVs has its global position information before performing the area coverage task and that ranging measurements can be obtained among the UAVs by using ultra-wide band (UWB) sensors. In this case, multi-UAV relative localization and cooperative coverage control have to be run simultaneously, which is a quite challenging task. In this paper, we propose a single-landmark-based relative localization algorithm, combined with a distributed coverage control law. At the same time, the optimal multi-UAV placement problem was formulated as a quadratic programming problem by compromising between optimal relative localization and optimal coverage control and was solved by using Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) algorithms. Simulation results show that our proposed method can guarantee that a team of UAVs can efficiently localize themselves in a cooperative manner and, at the same time, complete the area coverage task.


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