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Autonomy, cooperation, and awareness

  • ID: WP4-33
  • Contributor: UNIVAQ
  • Owner: UNIVAQ
  • Licence: OPEN SOURCE
  • expected TRL: 3-4
  • KET: Command and control; Intelligent Mission Management; Obstacle Detection and Avoidance.
  • Contact: Stefano Di Gennaro (stefano.digennaro@univaq.it); Mario Di Ferdinando (mario.diferdinando@univaq.it).

Autonomy, cooperation, and awareness.

The provided component concerns a robust digital algorithm for the autonomous navigation and cooperation of UAVs. In particular, the proposed digital control system is designed by taking simultaneously into account: the presence of sampling and quantization in the used devices; the presence of external disturbances such as measurement uncertainties and environment perturbations. The proposed control algorithm is able to arbitrarily attenuate the effects of such external disturbances and allows the main swarm cooperative strategies, namely time-varying flight formation, swarm tracking, and social foraging. The proposed control strategy includes also functionalities for the obstacle avoidance and the collision avoidance between adjacent members of the swarm. Limitations in the communication network are also considered. Indeed, the case in which each UAV can communicate with only a subset of the swarm is included. The external disturbances are unknown for the proposed control algorithm and no estimators are designed for the involved disturbances. The only knowledge required by the controller for attenuating external disturbances is their bound. An efficient strategy for the implementation on FPGAs of the proposed control algorithm is also presented. In particular, the proposed methodology is mainly focused on retiming and pipelining which allows: (i) lower execution times, and hence smaller sampling times, than its naive implementation; (ii) to take into account the energetic aspects of the controller implementations, and not only the controller performance. The proposed control strategy relies on methodology recently introduced in [1]-[7].

[1] M. Di Ferdinando, P. Pepe. Robustification of Sample-and-Hold Stabilizers for Control-Affine Time-Delay Systems, Automatica, vol 83, pp 141-154, 2017.

[2] M. Di Ferdinando, P. Pepe, A. Borri, On Practical Stability Preservation under Fast Sampling and Accurate Quantization of Feedbacks for Nonlinear Time–Delay Systems, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, vol 66, pp 314–321, 2021.

[3] C. A. Lúa, S. D. Gennaro et. al., Digital Implementation via FPGA of Controllers for Active Control of Ground Vehicles, IEEE Trans. on Ind. Inf., vol 15, pp 2253-2264, 2019.

[4] F. Cesarone and P. Pepe, Sample-and-hold solution of a consensus problem with nonlinear dynamics and input/output disturbances, European Journal of Control, 2020.

[5] F. Cesarone and P. Pepe, Robustification of sample-and-hold controllers for the consensus problem, 2019 Annual European Control Conference, pp. 471--476, 2019, doi:10.23919/ECC.2019.8796076.

[6] R. Carli, G. Cavone, N. Epicoco, M. Di Ferdinando, P. Scarabaggio and M. Dotoli, Consensus-Based Algorithms for Controlling Swarms of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Ad-Hoc, Mobile, and Wireless Networks. ADHOC-NOW 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 12338, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1007.

[7] M. Di Ferdinando, P. Pepe, S. Di Gennaro, Robust Sampled-Data Consensus-Based Cooperative Control of Multi UAVs, 29th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation, Bari, Italy, 22-25 June 2021, to appear.