Autonomous Multi-rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Tactical Coverage

Abstract

This chapter presents an original guidance system for autonomous multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with forward-facing cameras and tasked with creating maps of unknown environments while operating in a tactical manner and at very low altitudes. The few existing guidance systems for UAVs operating in potentially hazardous environments essentially assume direct information on the location and the kind of potential threat to the aircraft, do not account for the UAV’s dynamics, and usually assumes that the UAV operates at high altitudes. The proposed guidance system, on the contrary, assumes no prior information on the environment and does not rely on external sources of information. Furthermore, to enable operations at low altitudes and in cluttered environments, the proposed guidance system includes a fast trajectory planner. For these features, UAV employing this guidance system can be employed by first responders and other emergency units to collect real-time data about a given location. Several unique features distinguish the proposed guidance system, including an original algorithm to cover connected set, which allows users to prioritize accuracy over flight time, an original algorithm to produce convex constraint sets in real time from voxel maps, and original approaches to induce tactical behaviors both in the optimization-based path planner and the model predictive control-based trajectory planner underlying the proposed guidance system. Numerical simulations validate the applicability and the effectiveness of the proposed guidance system.