Coordinated Control of Multi-Agent Systems in Rapidly Varying Environments

The main objective of this Phase II STTR project is to develop advanced control algorithms that enable multiple autonomous agents to perform complex tasks in rapidly changing environment cooperatively. We plan to use the forest fire monitoring mission to demonstrate the benefits of the proposed technology. The mission concept involves using multiple Low Altitude Short Endurance (LASE) Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with camera and wireless communication modem to monitor a forest fire. Advantages of using LASE UAVs for this mission include flexible deployment, capability to collect high resolution imagery data, more frequent data update to the ground crew, and significantly lower cost than existing means (e.g. manned helicopter). Since the fire monitoring mission shares many characteristics of future NASA space exploration or Earth observing missions that require autonomous control of multiple satellite or vehicles, the proposed technology is expected to be applicable in those missions as well. Our technical objectives for this project are: (i) Develop autonomous decentralized cooperative control scheme; (ii) Develop payload driven perimeter tracking algorithms; (iii) Develop autonomous data acquisition and rectification algorithms; (iv) Develop intelligent fleet management algorithm, and (v) Demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed system through flight tests on prototype UAV hardware.