Innovative Collaborative Task Allocation for UAVs

Decades of advances in electronics and communication technologies have enabled large-scale, flexible, reconfigurable multiple-UAV systems with a variety of applications ranging from large-scale military surveillance and reconnaissance to environmental monitoring and disaster response. Most of these applications require multiple tasks and service requests to be handled by a large group of UAVs in an efficient manner. Motivated by these problems, this chapter is devoted to a large-scale distributed task/target assignment problem for a fleet of autonomous UAVs. Central to this chapter is an algorithm that uses the delayed column generation approach on a non-convex supply-demand formulation for the problem. The algorithm exploits a computationally tractable distributed S. Karaman ( ) Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA e-mail: sertac@MIT.EDU E. Koyuncu Controls and Avionics Laboratory, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: emre.koyuncu@itu.edu.tr G. Inalhan Faculty of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: inalhan@itu.edu.tr K.P. Valavanis, G.J. Vachtsevanos (eds.), Handbook of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9707-1 20, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 201 1601