A Fault-Tolerant Cooperative Positioning Approach for Multiple UAVs

Due to the increasing potentials and benefits of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in civil and surveillance applications, the cooperative flight using multiple UAVs has attracted more and more attention. However, fault-tolerant cooperative positioning for malfunctions in global positioning system (GPS) is one of the challenges that need to be addressed in various practical applications of UAVs. Motivated by solving this issue, this paper presents a reliable cooperative positioning approach for multiple UAVs cooperative flight by using the geometric azimuth angle and the inclination angle relative to the reference UAVs. In this proposed cooperative positioning system (COPS), these relative angles are measured through radio direction finding equipped on UAVs. With the horizontal dilution of precision of the various reference UAVs carefully analyzed, the optimal reference UAVs set can be first selected. Based on a constant acceleration kinematic model, an extended Kalman filter is then employed to improve the positioning accuracy. A COPS/GPS fault-tolerant navigation algorithm is finally developed to accommodate GPS fault. Simulation results are further presented to verify that the proposed algorithm can guarantee satisfactory navigation of the UAVs even when their GPS cannot work.

[1]  S. Sukkarieh,et al.  Co-operative Localisation and Mapping for Multiple UAVs in Unknown Environments , 2007, 2007 IEEE Aerospace Conference.

[2]  Alexander Yarovoy,et al.  Design and full-wave analysis of conformal ultra-wideband radio direction finders , 2011 .

[3]  Jin Jiang,et al.  Hybrid Fault-Tolerant Flight Control System Design Against Partial Actuator Failures , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology.

[4]  Mohammad Javad Yazdanpanah,et al.  Application of Finite-Time Integral Sliding Mode to Guidance Law Design , 2015 .

[5]  John D'Azzo,et al.  Close formation flight control , 1999 .

[6]  L. Bertel,et al.  Radio direction finding applied to DVB-T network for vehicular mobile reception , 2009, 2009 3rd European Conference on Antennas and Propagation.

[7]  Jian Chen,et al.  Multiple UAV navigation with finite sensing zone , 2006, 2006 American Control Conference.

[8]  Timothy W. McLain,et al.  Coordinated target assignment and intercept for unmanned air vehicles , 2002, Proceedings 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.02CH37292).

[9]  Kenzo Nonami,et al.  A visual navigation system for autonomous flight of micro air vehicles , 2009, 2009 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[10]  Youmin Zhang,et al.  Bibliographical review on reconfigurable fault-tolerant control systems , 2003, Annu. Rev. Control..

[11]  Åke Wernersson,et al.  Development of an INS/GPS Navigation Loop for an UAV , 2001 .

[12]  John C. McEachen,et al.  A Method for Fast Radio Frequency Direction Finding Using Wireless Sensor Networks , 2008, Proceedings of the 41st Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2008).

[13]  Wei Kang,et al.  Co-ordinated attitude control of multi-satellite systems† , 2002 .

[14]  R. D'Andrea,et al.  Distributed control of close formation flight , 2002, Proceedings of the 41st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2002..

[15]  Youmin Zhang,et al.  Aircraft Fault Accommodation With Consideration of Actuator Control Authority and Gyro Availability , 2018, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology.

[16]  Xiang Yu,et al.  Fault-Tolerant Flight Control Design with Explicit Consideration of Reconfiguration Transients , 2016 .

[17]  Zhixiang Liu,et al.  Fault-Tolerant Flight Control Design With Finite-Time Adaptation Under Actuator Stuck Failures , 2017, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology.

[18]  Iman Mohammadzaman,et al.  PID guidance law design using short time stability approach , 2015 .

[19]  Yaohong Qu,et al.  Cooperative localization against GPS signal loss in multiple UAVs flight , 2011 .

[20]  Okyay Kaynak,et al.  Tracking Control of Robotic Manipulators With Uncertain Kinematics and Dynamics , 2016, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics.

[21]  Matthew Garratt,et al.  Adding Optical Flow into the GPS/INS Integration for UAV navigation , 2009 .

[22]  Yew-Wen Liang,et al.  Study of Nonlinear Integral Sliding Mode Fault-Tolerant Control , 2016, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics.

[23]  Peng Shi,et al.  Intelligent Tracking Control for a Class of Uncertain High-Order Nonlinear Systems , 2016, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems.

[24]  G. Inalhan,et al.  Decentralized overlapping control of a formation of unmanned aerial vehicles , 2002, Proceedings of the 41st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2002..

[25]  Eric N. Johnson,et al.  Relative Motion Estimation for Vision-based Formation Flight using Unscented Kalman Filter , 2007 .

[26]  Ligang Wu,et al.  A Structure Simple Controller for Satellite Attitude Tracking Maneuver , 2017, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics.

[27]  Weiguo Xia,et al.  Adaptive Fuzzy Hierarchical Sliding-Mode Control for a Class of MIMO Nonlinear Time-Delay Systems With Input Saturation , 2017, IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems.

[28]  Shen Yin,et al.  Velocity-Free Fault-Tolerant and Uncertainty Attenuation Control for a Class of Nonlinear Systems , 2016, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics.

[29]  Iman Mohammadzaman,et al.  Finite-time convergent guidance law based on integral backstepping control , 2014 .

[30]  Jonathan P. How,et al.  Cooperative path planning for multiple UAVs in dynamic and uncertain environments , 2002, Proceedings of the 41st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2002..