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Distributed Cooperative Path Planning for Tracking Ground Moving Target by Multiple Fixed-wing UAVs via DMPC-GVD in Urban Environment

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  • Control Theory and Applications
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Abstract

In this paper, a real-time distributed path planning method is developed for cooperatively tracking ground moving target in urban by multiple fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). For reasons of changeable movement of target, the commanded speed and turning rate of each UAV are both taken as control input variables. In urban environment, buildings may occlude the line of sight of on-board sensor. Hence the target coverage degree is proposed as objective function instead of distance. To save energy of UAV system as much as possible, the control input cost and sensor energy consumption are also taken as objectives. For preemptive priority requirement, the objective functions are fuzzified and the satisfactory degree order is designed to model priority. To guarantee the feasibility of solution, the varying domain is introduced to replace the strict order constraint. On this basis, generalized varying domain (GVD) method is developed to balance optimization and priority. In terms of the maneuverability of UAVs, the diverse constraints are considered, including real speed and turning rate, control input saturation, collision avoidance between UAVs, and obstacle avoidance between UAV and buildings. Consequently, distributed model predictive control (DMPC) strategy is designed to calculate the optimal path of each UAV, where the state information in finite period of UAV is transferred to the adjacent ones. The simulations show the effectiveness of proposed method by comparing with hierarchical optimization (HO).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072, China

    Chaofang Hu, Zhuo Meng & Ge Qu

  2. Key Laboratory of System Control and Information Processing, Ministry of Education, Shanghai, 200240, China

    Chaofang Hu, Zhuo Meng & Ge Qu

  3. School of Aerospace, Transport and Manufacturing, Cranfield University, Cranfield, UK

    Hyo-Sang Shin & Antonios Tsourdos

Authors
  1. Chaofang Hu
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  2. Zhuo Meng
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  3. Ge Qu
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  4. Hyo-Sang Shin
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  5. Antonios Tsourdos
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Correspondence to Chaofang Hu.

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Recommended by Associate Editor SeungKeun Kim under the direction of Editor Chan Gook Park. This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant (No. 61773279), and Research Foundation of Key Laboratory of System Control and Information Processing, Ministry of Education (No. Scip201608). The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and constructive suggestions with regard to this paper. The authors declare that there is no conflict of interests regarding the publication of this article.

Chaofang Hu received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in automation from Hebei University of Technology, China, in 1997 and 2003, respectively, and a Ph.D. degree in control theory and control engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, in 2007. He is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Tianjin University, China. His research interests include aeronautical systems, unmanned autonomous systems, predictive control, nonlinear control, multi-objective optimization.

Zhuo Meng received her B.S. degree from College of Electrical Automation and Information Engineering, Shaanxi University of Science and Technology, China, in 2016. She received an M.S. degree in control science and engineering from Tianjin University, Tianjin, China, in 2020. Her research interests include path planning of unmanned aerial vehicle, predictive control and multiobjective optimization.

Ge Qu received her B.S. degree in Automation from Tianjin University, Tianjin, China, in 2019. She is currently pursuing an M.S. degree in control science and engineering from Tianjin University, Tianjin, China. Her research interests include path planning and task assignment of unmanned aerial vehicle system, and multi-objective optimization.

Hyo-Sang Shin received his B.Sc. degree in aerospace engineering from Pusan National University in 2004. He gained an M.Sc. degree in aerospace engineering with focus on flight dynamics guidance and control from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in 2006 and a Ph.D. degree in cooperative missile guidance from Cranfield University in 2011. He is currently the Head of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems Group and a Professor of Guidance Navigation and Control with Cranfield University, UK. His research interests include multiple target tracking, probabilistic target detection and distributed control of multiple agent systems. He is an Associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems.

Antonios Tsourdos received his M.Eng. degree in electronic, control and systems engineering from the University of Sheffield, UK, in 1995, an M.Sc. degree in systems engineering from Cardiff University, UK, in 1996, and a Ph.D. degree in nonlinear robust missile autopilot design and analysis from Cranfield University, UK, in 1999. He is currently the Head of the Autonomous and Cyber-Physical Systems Centre and a Professor of Control Systems with Cranfield University, UK. His research interests include unmanned aerial vehicles guidance and control, trajectory optimization, and advanced control systems.

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Hu, C., Meng, Z., Qu, G. et al. Distributed Cooperative Path Planning for Tracking Ground Moving Target by Multiple Fixed-wing UAVs via DMPC-GVD in Urban Environment. Int. J. Control Autom. Syst. 19, 823–836 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-019-0625-0

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