Polymorphic Control Reconfiguration in an Autonomous UAV with UGV Collaboration

The emergence of distributed technologies as a reliable infrastructure for real-time control is enabling a new generation of distributed plug-and-play control architectures and methodologies; increasingly common are control systems that pass real-time data across traditional system boundaries to utilize distributed remote sensing, processing, and actuation. The polymorphic control systems (PCS) project formalizes constructs that permits topological reconfiguration of control systems that span multiple heterogeneous systems and multiple communication mediums, towards the goal of control coordination and strategy optimization in a multi-system environment, increased resilience to failure and uncertainty, increased overall and individual performance, and better utilization of available resources. This paper presents the concepts behind PCS, and presents results from a flight test experiment involving distributed reconfiguration of an autonomous landing controller in a collaborative multi-vehicle environment. These flight test experiments demonstrate one of the goals of polymorphic reconfiguration: providing emergency assistance and collaborative coordination between multiple systems to achieve safely the mission critical objectives, where a system failure would have resulted in the loss of the aircraft.