Air-ground coordinated unmanned swarm systems: A multitasking framework for control design

An air-ground heterogeneous unmanned swarm system coordination is considered. The system consists of N unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and one unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). This forms a complicated mission, which consists of the following four different tasks. First, the aerial vehicles are in a compact formation, while avoiding collision with each other. Second, the aerial vehicles should stay close to the ground, while avoiding collision with the ground. Third, the aerial vehicles should stay close to the ground vehicle. Fourth, the ground vehicle should follow a desired trajectory. These tasks reflect two seemingly contradictory nature: close to (due to tracking) and away from (due to avoidance). The effective control design should address all four tasks even in the presence of uncertainty. By two creative transformations, this multitude of tasks are consolidated in a chi-measure. An adaptive robust control, which includes a robust control scheme and an online adaptation law, is then proposed to render guarantee boundedness performance of this chi-measure. As a result, the control design is able to accomplish the combined tracking-avoidance mission for the uncertain swarm system. Despite the presence of conflicting aspects between these tasks, the designed controller exhibits outstanding performance.