Leader–follower control of multi-unmanned aerial vehicle based on supervisory control theory for a broad tributary area mapping scenario

Abstract

This study proposes a discrete event system-based control strategy for autonomous tributary mapping using multi-unmanned aerial vehicle. When considering the unmanned aerial vehicles as discrete event systems, supervisory control theory is used to model and control individual unmanned aerial vehicle behavior in the system. In tributary mapping, the situation changes each time depending on environmental factors (e.g. weather) and the work must be performed in an unstructured environment. Therefore, this article proposes a multi-unmanned aerial vehicle-based supervisory control system to solve real-field problems. Unlike the control systems of recent studies, which mainly deal with continuous-time dynamics, we modeled a multi-unmanned aerial vehicle system based on a discrete event system in which the dynamic states are transitioned by asynchronous events. The proposed multi-unmanned aerial vehicle-based supervisory control system was validated in dynamic simulators and demonstrated that multi-unmanned aerial vehicle satisfies the behavior specifications. The supervisor proposed in this study was validated using a physics-based simulator.