Executive Decision Support: Single-Agent Control of Multiple UAVs

IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine JUNE 2009 1070-9932/09/$25.00a2009 IEEE 73 O ne challenge facing coordination and deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) today is the amount of human involvement needed to carry out a successful mission. Currently, control and coordination of UAVs typically involves multiple operators to control a single agent. The aim of this article is to invert this relationship, enabling a single pilot to control and coordinate a group of UAVs. Furthermore, decision support is provided to the pilot to facilitate effective control of the UAV team. In the scenario envisioned in this article, the human operator (the pilot) is operating along-side a team of UAVs. The pilot communicates with the UAV team remotely and controls the UAV team to execute a surveillance mission. An important aspect of this is the question of how much the pilot should interact with the UAV team and how much aid should be provided to the pilot without overloading the pilot with data and support. We address this issue by allowing two major modes of operations, namely autonomous mode and pilot-controlled mode. In both of these modes, the UAV team is controlled in a leader–follower manner, and the leader UAV is assigned by the pilot, where the followers are positioning themselves with respect to the other UAVs in the network. In the autonomous mode, the leader UAVexecutes the mission without intervention of the pilot. At any time, the pilot is allowed to take over and directly control the leader vehicle. Hence, the pilot can interrupt the mission to investigate an area or avoid certain threats. The pilot can also release control of the UAV, and the UAV team automatically resumes the execution of the given mission. The problem of controlling multiple agents in a coordinated fashion to achieve a set of goals, such as maintaining desired formations, ensuring coverage