de Oliveira Floriano, Bruno Rodolfo (Universidade de Brasilia), Borges, Geovany Araújo (University of Brasília), Ferreira, Henrique Cezar (University of Brasilia)

Planning for Decentralized Formation Flight of UAV Fleets in Uncertain Environments with Dec-POMDP

Scheduled for presentation during the Poster Session "Poster Papers" (WeP5), Wednesday, June 12, 2019, 13:00−18:00, Foyer

2020 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS), June 11-14, 2019, Athens, Greece

This information is tentative and subject to change. Compiled on April 19, 2024

Abstract

The increasingly interest in cooperative flight of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), alongside the development of sophisticated embedded systems, made possible for numerous algorithms to control multi-agent systems of fling vehicles. However, many of these algorithms still require high communications between vehicles, or with a central unit, as well as reliable sensors. The Decentralized Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (Dec-POMDP) is a model for decentralized planning of multi-agents systems, considering uncertain observations and low communication reliability. Although this framework has been used for UAV systems, formation flight is still a problem not considered in this scenario. This paper proposes the use of the Dec-POMDP planning algorithm for high-level decision making in UAV formation flight, making use of existent flight controllers in an inner-loop, allowing computational feasibility. Simulation results show that the proposed method allows for decentralized formation tracking, with communication restrictions, as well as collision avoidance and time-varying formations.