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Drones
Special Issues
Large Scale Cooperative UAS: Control Theory and Applications
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Large Scale Cooperative UAS: Control Theory and Applications

A special issue of Drones (ISSN 2504-446X). This special issue belongs to the section "Drone Design and Development".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (25 December 2023) | Viewed by 3526

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Venanzio Cichella

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA
Interests: motion planning; collision avoidance
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Prof. Dr. Isaac I. Kaminer

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Mechanical and Astronautical Engineering, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA 93943, USA
Interests: unmanned air vehicles; modeling and simulation; flight controls; cooperative control of unmanned air vehicles
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dr. Claire Walton

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Mathematics, The University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX 78249, USA
Interests: optimal control; robust control machine learning
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Over the past few years, we have seen increasing interest in the study of large-scale multi-unmanned aerial systems (UASs), with applications in engineering and science problems. This interest is largely motivated by the advent of powerful and miniaturized embedded systems, sensors, and communication networks. For example, flight controllers have evolved from simple stability augmentation systems, barely enabling an external unexperienced pilot to remotely fly a multirotor unmanned aerial vehicle, to fully fledged command augmentation systems, opening up the possibilities of autonomous operations of large-scale cooperative UASs.

This Special Issue aims at collecting new theory, developments, methodologies, and applications of large-scale multiple UASs.

We welcome submissions that provide the community with the most recent advancements on all aspects of large-scale cooperative UASs. These include, but are not limited to, multi-agent coordination, cooperative control, flocking, swarming and counter-swarming, consensus, formation, multi-agent motion planning and collision avoidance, cooperative learning, and graph-related theory. Also relevant are the applications of the theory developed in the areas of multi-vehicle systems for spacecraft, ground robots, and maritime vehicles. Applications include multi-agent target localization, object recognition, search and rescue, communications, defense, and transportation, to mention but a few.

You may choose our Joint Special Issue in Automation.

Dr. Venanzio Cichella
Prof. Dr. Isaac I. Kaminer
Dr. Claire Walton
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Drones is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • multi-vehicle motion planning
  • coordination
  • multi-agent deconfliction
  • formation control
  • swarming
  • estimation and localization by multiple robots

Published Papers (2 papers)

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23 pages, 4907 KiB  
Article
Robust Cooperative Control of UAV Swarms for Dual-Camp Divergent Tracking of a Heterogeneous Target
by Bing Jiang, Kaiyu Qin, Tong Li, Boxian Lin and Mengji Shi
Drones 2023, 7(5), 306; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/drones7050306 - 5 May 2023
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 1271
Abstract
Agents are used to exhibit swarm intelligence in the sense of convergence, while divergence is equivalently common in nature and useful in complex applications for multi-UAV systems. This paper proposes a robust target-tracking control algorithm, where UAV swarms are partitioned by a signed [...] Read more.
Agents are used to exhibit swarm intelligence in the sense of convergence, while divergence is equivalently common in nature and useful in complex applications for multi-UAV systems. This paper proposes a robust target-tracking control algorithm, where UAV swarms are partitioned by a signed graph to perform opposite movements along or against the trajectory of the target. Uncertainties take place in both the fractional-order model of the target and the double-integrator dynamics of the UAVs. To tackle the challenge induced by the bipartite behavior and unknown components in the multi-UAV systems, the article comes up with a backstepping cascade controller and a new method for uncertainty estimation-compensation via a combined approach based on a neural network (NN) and an Uncertainty and Disturbance Estimator (UDE). Steered by the controller, UAVs in a structurally balanced network will display symmetry of their paths, pursuing or away from the target with respect to the origin. Theoretical derivation and numerical simulations have evidenced that the tracking errors converge to zero. Compared with the traditional NN method to solve such problems, this method is proposed for the first time, which can effectively improve the precision of cooperative target tracking and reduce the chattering phenomena of the controller. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Large Scale Cooperative UAS: Control Theory and Applications)
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23 pages, 1348 KiB  
Article
Coordinated Vision-Based Tracking by Multiple Unmanned Vehicles
by Venanzio Cichella and Isaac Kaminer
Drones 2023, 7(3), 177; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/drones7030177 - 5 Mar 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1591
Abstract
We address the problem of coordinated vision-based tracking of a moving target using multiple unmanned vehicles that exchange information over a supporting time-varying network. The objective of this work is to formulate decentralized control algorithms that enable multiple vehicles to follow the target [...] Read more.
We address the problem of coordinated vision-based tracking of a moving target using multiple unmanned vehicles that exchange information over a supporting time-varying network. The objective of this work is to formulate decentralized control algorithms that enable multiple vehicles to follow the target while coordinating their phase separation. A typical scenario involves multiple unmanned aerial vehicles that are required to monitor a moving ground object (target tracking) while maintaining a desired inter-vehicle separation (coordination). To solve the vision-based tracking problem, the yaw rate of each vehicle is used as the control input, while the speeds of the vehicles are adjusted to achieve coordination. It is assumed that the vehicles are equipped with an internal autopilot, which is able to track yaw rate and speed commands. The performance of the coordinated vision-based tracking algorithm is evaluated as a function of the target’s velocity, tracking performance of the onboard autopilot, and the quality of service of the communication network. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Large Scale Cooperative UAS: Control Theory and Applications)
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