Cooperative controls with intermittent communication
Dan Shen, Genshe Chen, Jose B. Cruz, Khanh Dai Pham, Erik Blasch, Robert S. Lynch · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2010
In this paper, we propose a solution to the cooperative path planning with limited communication problem in two phases. In the first (offline) phase, a Pareto-optimal path problem is formulated to find a reference path and the graph cuts minimization method is used to speedily calculate the optimal solution. In the second (online) phase, a foraging algorithm is used to dynamically refine the reference path to meet the dynamic constraints of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAVs), during which an open-loop feedback optimal (OLFO) controller is used to estimate the states which may be unavailable due to infrequent battlefield information updates. Furthermore, an adaptive Markov decision process is proposed to deal with intermittent asynchronous information flow. The method is demonstrated in a simulation for a swarm of Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) teams with various communication ranges.