A Quadral-Fuzzy control approach to flight formation by a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles

This paper addresses the control of a fleet of unmanned aerial systems (UAVs), termed as drones, for flight formation problems. Getting drones to fly in formation is a relevant problem to be solved when cooperative cargo transportation is desired. A general approach for this problem considers the co...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE access 2020-01, Vol.8, p.1-1
Main Authors: Teixeira, Marco Antonio Simoes, Neves, Flavio, Koubaa, Anis, De Arruda, Lucia Valeria Ramos, De Oliveira, Andre Schneider
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
autonomous flight
Barriers
Collision avoidance
distance-based formation
Drone aircraft
Drones
flight-formation control
Fuzzy control
Fuzzy systems
multi-agent systems
Potential fields
Sensor systems
Sensors
Space perception
Three-dimensional displays
Unmanned aerial vehicles
unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)
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Summary:This paper addresses the control of a fleet of unmanned aerial systems (UAVs), termed as drones, for flight formation problems. Getting drones to fly in formation is a relevant problem to be solved when cooperative cargo transportation is desired. A general approach for this problem considers the coordination of a fleet of UAVs, by fusing all information coming from several individual sensors posed on each UAVs. However, this approach induces a high cost as every UAV should have its advanced perception system. As an alternative, this paper proposes the use of a single perception system by a fleet composed of several elementary drones (workers) with primitive low-cost sensors and a leader drone carrying a 3D perception source. We propose a Quadral-Fuzzy approach to ensure that all drones fly in formation and will not collide with each other or with environment obstacles. We also develop a new way to compute potential fields based on possibility fuzzy (fuzziness) measure with the focus of avoiding collisions between the drones. The proposed approach encompasses four high-coupled intelligent controllers that respectively control the leader and worker drones' motion and implement obstacle and collision avoidance procedures. Simulation results using a fleet of four aerial drones are presented, showing the potential for solving usual problems to flights in formation, such as dodging obstacles, avoiding collisions between the drones, among others.
ISSN:2169-3536
2169-3536
DOI:10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2985032