Jorge Cortés
Professor
Cymer Corporation Endowed Chair
Optimal leader allocation in UAV formation pairs under
no-cost switching
D. Richert, J. Cortés
Proceedings of the American Control Conference,
Montréal, Canada, 2012, pp. 3297-3302
Abstract
This paper considers a group of UAVs that travel from
origin to destination locations. Individual agents can
choose to either fly directly to their destination or
pair with other agents into a leader-follower formation
to conserve fuel. In the latter case, only the follower
experiences a cost benefit, and hence UAVs must
negotiate how to fairly allocate the task of leading.
We show that selfish agents cannot reach satisfactory
collaboration agreements, which leads us to propose the
notion of $\epsilon$-cooperativeness. For this class of
UAVs, we introduce the \algoP to strategically schedule
alternating leading and following intervals that induce
cooperation. We show that the proposed strategy is
guaranteed to find leader allocations with the minimum
number of leader-follower switches. Moreover, these
allocations are optimal with regards to the cost that
UAVs can attain while collaborating with other UAVs.
Several simulations illustrate our results.
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Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering,
University of California, San Diego
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