Multi-functional autopilot design and experiments for rotorcraft-based unmanned aerial vehicles

In this paper, we present a hierarchical guidance and control system designed for rotorcraft-based unmanned aerial vehicles (RUAVs) for cooperative multi-agent scenarios. The issues of a multi-agent system is resolved with a distributed hierarchical structure, which gradually transforms abstract mission commands into realtime control signals for multiple numbers of agents. The cooperative operations of multiple agents are realized by the centralized strategic planner, which interacts with other agents through a high-bandwidth wireless communication system. The proposed design is implemented on a Berkeley UAV, Ursa Magna 2, and four other unmanned ground vehicles and validated thoroughly in a variety of tests from way-point navigation to pursuit-evasion games.