Practical Distributed Control for VTOL UAVs to Pass a Virtual Tube

TL;DR

This paper presents a practical distributed control method for VTOL UAVs to safely pass through virtual tubes, ensuring collision avoidance and adherence to airspace constraints, validated through simulations and experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel distributed control approach for VTOL UAVs to pass virtual tubes, incorporating collision avoidance and safety guarantees with formal analysis.

Findings

UAVs can pass virtual tubes without collision

The method ensures UAVs stay within the virtual tube

Simulations and experiments confirm effectiveness

Abstract

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 of airways, intersections and nodes. In this paper, for simplicity, distributed coordinating the motions of Vertical TakeOff and Landing (VTOL) UAVs to pass an airway is focused. This is formulated as a virtual tube 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 on invariant set theorem is 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.