Formation control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has many applications including target tracking, surveillance, terrain mapping, precision agriculture, etc. Although many centralized control methods (single command center/computer controlling the UAVs) exist, there are no standard decentralized control frameworks in the literature. In this paper, we present a novel UAV swarm formation control approach based on a decision theoretic approach. Specifically, we pose the decentralized swarm motion control problem as a Decentralized Markov Decision Process (Dec-MDP). Here, the objective is to drive the swarm from an initial geographical region to another geographical region where the swarm must lie on a certain geometrical surface (e.g., surface of a sphere). As most decision theoretic formulations suffer from the curse of dimensionality, we adapt an approximate dynamic programming method called nominal belief-state optimization (NBO) to solve the formation control problem approximately. We perform simulation studies in MATLAB to validate the performance of the algorithms.
We develop tractable solutions to the problem of controlling the directions of 2-D directional sensors for maximizing information gain corresponding to multiple targets in 2-D. The target locations are known with some uncertainty given by a joint prior distribution (Gaussian). A sensor generates a (noisy) measurement of a target only if the target lies within the field-of-view of the sensor, and the measurements from all the sensors are fused to form global estimates of target locations. This problem is hard to solve exactly - the computation time increases exponentially with the number of sensors. We develop heuristic methods to solve the problem approximately and provide lower and upper bounds on the optimal information gain. We improve the solutions from these heuristic approaches by formulating the problem as a dynamic programming problem and solving it using a rollout approach.
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