Elemental maneuvers and coordination structures for unmanned air vehicles

The practical coordination and control of unmanned air vehicles (UAV) is addressed in a distributed control framework. The key specification concepts are elemental maneuvers and team maneuvers. Elemental maneuvers abstract the key modes of operation of each UAV. Team maneuvers abstract team operations in terms of elemental maneuvers and coordination constraints. The coordination structure for team operations consists of vehicle supervisors, one per UAV, team supervisors, and links connecting them. These links define the information structure and the roles for each vehicle, and may change during execution. Each vehicle supervisor interacts with a team supervisor through a simple coordination protocol. We model this distributed control problem in the framework of dynamic networks of hybrid automata. We use dynamic optimization and nonlinear control techniques to synthesize elemental maneuver controllers.