Hierarchical distributed control for search and tracking by heterogeneous aerial robot networks

This paper presents a hierarchical control architecture that enables cooperative surveillance by a heterogeneous aerial robot network comprised of mothership unmanned aircraft and daughtership micro air vehicles. Combining the endurance, range, and processing capabilities of the motherships with the stealth, flexibility, and maneuverability of swarms of daughterships enables robust control of aerial robot networks conducting collaborative operations. The hierarchical control structure decomposes the system into components that take advantage of the abilities of the different types of vehicles. The motherships act as distributed databases, fusion centers, negotiation agents, and task supervisors while daughtership control is achieved using cooperative vector field tracking. This paper describes the overall architecture and then focuses on the assignment and tracking algorithms used once sub- teams of daughtership vehicles have been deployed. A summary of the communication, command, and control structure of a heterogeneous unmanned aircraft system is also given in this paper along with hardware-in-the-loop and software simulation results verifying several components of the distributed control architecture.