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A Guidance System for Tactical Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

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Abstract

This paper presents an original guidance system able to confer a tactical behavior to multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), such as quadcopters, that operate in potentially hostile, unknown, cluttered environments. By applying this guidance system, UAVs complete the assigned tasks, such as reaching a goal set, while minimizing both their exposure to opponents, whose location is unknown, and the predictability of their trajectories. A taxonomy of flight behaviors is provided to help users tuning those parameters that characterize the UAV’s level of cautiousness. This guidance system is supported by an original navigation system that exploits exclusively information gathered by onboard cameras and inertial measurement units. Numerical simulations and flight tests validate the applicability of the proposed guidance system in real-time, while performing all calculations aboard the UAV.

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Code Availability

The computer codes employed to perform the numerical simulations and flight tests presented in this paper will be disclosed at https://doi.org/http://laffitto.com/guidance_code.html upon acceptance for publication of this paper.

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Funding

This work was supported in part by DARPA under the Grant no. D18AP00069.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, 24061, USA

    Julius A. Marshall, Robert B. Anderson & Andrea L’Afflitto

  2. Department of Aerospace Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, 16802, USA

    Wen-Yu Chien & Eric N. Johnson

Authors
  1. Julius A. Marshall
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  2. Robert B. Anderson
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  3. Wen-Yu Chien
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  4. Eric N. Johnson
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  5. Andrea L’Afflitto
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Contributions

Mr. J. A. Marshall primarily contributed to the literature review presented in Section 2, the coding of the trajectory planner presented in Section 4.2, the numerical simulations presented in Sections 7 and 9, and the flight tests presented in Section 8.

Dr. R. B. Anderson primarily contributed to the literature review presented in Section 2, the coding of the path planner presented in Section 4.1, some of the numerical simulations presented in Section 7 and some of the flight tests presented in Section 8.

Mr. W.-Y. Chien contributed to Section 5 and the coding of the navigation system employed in this work. Dr. E. N. Johnson supervised and contributed to the work performed by Mr. Chien.

Dr. A. L’Afflitto coordinated the work effort and primarily contributed to writing Section 1 and editing all other sections of this paper with the assistance of Mr. Marshall and Dr. Anderson.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Andrea L’Afflitto.

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Marshall, J.A., Anderson, R.B., Chien, WY. et al. A Guidance System for Tactical Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. J Intell Robot Syst 103, 71 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-021-01526-8

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