Aperiodic Communication for MPC in Autonomous Cooperative Landing

TL;DR

This paper presents an aperiodic communication-based distributed MPC algorithm for autonomous cooperative landing of UAVs and USVs, reducing communication needs while ensuring rendezvous feasibility.

Contribution

It introduces a novel rendezvous algorithm with online update of rendezvous location that operates with aperiodic communication, enhancing efficiency in heterogeneous agent coordination.

Findings

Reduces communication frequency between agents.

Guarantees recursive feasibility of the rendezvous algorithm.

Effective in simulation for autonomous cooperative landing.

Abstract

This paper investigates the rendezvous problem for the autonomous cooperative landing of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) on an unmanned surface vehicle (USV). Such heterogeneous agents, with nonlinear dynamics, are dynamically decoupled but share a common cooperative rendezvous task. The underlying control scheme is based on distributed Model Predictive Control (MPC). The main contribution is a rendezvous algorithm with an online update rule of the rendezvous location. The algorithm only requires the agents to exchange information when they can not guarantee to rendezvous. Hence, the exchange of information occurs aperiodically, which reduces the necessary communication between the agents. Furthermore, we prove that the algorithm guarantees recursive feasibility. The simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm applied to the problem of autonomous cooperative landing.