Time-Critical Cooperative Path Following of Multiple UAVs: Case Studies

This paper describes a multi-vehicle motion control framework for time-critical cooperative missions and evaluates its performance by considering two case studies: a simultaneous arrival mission scenario and a sequential auto-landing of a fleet of UAVs. In the adopted setup, the UAVs are assigned nominal spatial paths and speed profiles along those paths; the vehicles are then tasked to execute cooperative path following, rather than “open-loop” trajectory tracking. This cooperative strategy yields robust behavior against external disturbances by allowing the UAVs to negotiate their speeds along the paths in response to information exchanged over a supporting communications network.