Intelligent collaborative control for UAVs

This paper describes an autonomous Intelligent Controller (IC) architecture for collaborative control of unmanned autonomous vehicles. These vehicles may operate independently or cooperate to carry out complex missions. The IC technology has been demonstrated in prototype designs of actual, autonomous, unmanned, intelligently controlled vehicles and integrates human interactions at multiple levels. Recently, this control architecture has been applied to intelligent collaboration among multiple unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) operating in adverse environments. These past efforts expanded a preliminary collaborative control capability and now allow a group of autonomous agents or UAVs to dynamically and automatically reconfigure in response to varying mission requirements and to continue a mission even if the size of the group is reduced. Enhancements to the current controller include support for operations in three dimensions and exploiting higher fidelity information provided by sensors.