An Improved Cooperative Control Method for Hybrid Unmanned Aerial-Ground System in Multitasks

Abstract

The cooperative control in complex multitasks using unmanned aerial vehicle and unmanned ground vehicle (UAV/UGV) is an important and challenging issue in the multirobot cooperative field. The main goal of the task studied in this paper is to minimize the time and energy consumed by the system to complete the assigned tasks. In this paper, a complex multitask problem using the hybrid UAV/UGV system is studied, which is divided into three stages, namely, the stage of finding the optimal locations of the relay stations for the UGV; the stage of solving the path planning problem for the UGV; and the stage of the task assignment for multi-UAVs. Furthermore, an improved integrated method is proposed to deal with the cooperative control problems in these three stages. Firstly, an adaptive clustering method is proposed to determine the locations of the UGV relay stations, and then an improved cuckoo search algorithm is used to find the shortest path for the UGV. Finally, a grouping method is presented to solve the multitask allocation problem of UAVs, based on an improved dynamic programming algorithm. In addition, some simulations are carried out and the results show that the proposed method has better performance when it comes to the time and energy consumption and can effectively guide the hybrid UAV/UGV system to carry out the complex multitasks.