Coordination and control experiments on a multi-vehicle testbed

This paper introduces two unique testbeds that have recently been developed to demonstrate the cooperative control of teams of UAVs. The first testbed uses eight rovers and four blimps operated indoors to emulate a team of heterogeneous vehicles performing a combined reconnaissance and strike mission. The second testbed uses eight small aircraft that are flown autonomously using a commercially available autopilot. This combination of testbeds provides platforms for both advanced research and realistic demonstrations. Numerous trajectory optimization and team coordination algorithms have recently been developed to execute these UAV missions. This paper highlights several of these coordination and control algorithms and presents typical results for representative experiments. These demonstrations of the high-level planning algorithms on scaled vehicles operating in uncertain and dynamic environments represent key steps towards transitioning them to future UAV missions.