Practical Distributed Control for VTOL UAVs to Pass a Virtual Tube
Quan Quan, Rao Fu, Mengxin Li, Donghui Wei, Yan Gao, Kai‐Yuan Cai · IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles · 2021
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are now becoming increasingly accessible to amateur and commercial users alike. An air traffic management (ATM) system is needed to help ensure that this newest entrant into the skies does not collide with others. In an ATM, airspace can be composed ofairways, intersectionsandnodes.In this paper, for simplicity, distributed coordinating the motions of Vertical TakeOff and Landing (VTOL) UAVs to pass anairwayis focused. This is formulated as atube passing problem, which includes passing a virtual tube, inter-agent collision avoidance and keeping within the virtual tube. Lyapunov-like functions are designed elaborately, and formal analysis based oninvariant set theoremis made to show that all UAVs can pass the virtual tube without getting trapped, avoid collision and keep within the virtual tube. What is more, by the proposed distributed control, a VTOL UAV can keep away from another VTOL UAV or return back to the virtual tube as soon as possible, once it enters into the safety area of another or has a collision with the virtual tube during it is passing the virtual tube. Simulations and experiments are carried out to show the effectiveness of the proposed method and the comparison with other methods.