Some new optimal control problems in UAV cooperative control with information flow constraints

Unmanned air vehicles (UAV) of the future will be more lethal and more autonomous than remotely piloted reconnaissance platforms in use today. Much progress has been made for UAV cooperative control among many open issues. In this paper, UAV cooperative control with information flow constraints is considered. Three different situations are investigated that represent communication of information between vehicles as a sequence of impulses, a bandwidth-limited signal, and a range-limited signal. Specially, here the communication of information between vehicles is considered as another control input so that the UAV cooperative control problem with information flow constraints can be formulated to be a series of generalized optimal control problems. Necessary conditions for these optimal controls are obtained and one simulation example is also provided.