An approach to improve the performance of cooperative unmanned vehicle team

Abstract

In this paper, a method based on optimal energy management is proposed in order to improve the operational and tactical abilities of collaborative unmanned vehicle teams. Collaborative unmanned systems are used in surveillance, tracking, and military operations. The optimal assignment of these tasks requires cooperation among the vehicles in order to generate a strategy that is efficient with respect to overall mission duration and satisfies all problem constraints. The key motivation behind this paper is to design an unmanned vehicle team that mitigates the disadvantages caused by the structures and characteristics of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which are used in these systems. The design steps of the developed system are explained in three sections in a multidisciplinary fashion. In the first section, the optimal energy consumption profile is estimated by simulating the UAV's flight on a Nvidia Jetson TX2 embedded system, located on the UGV. In the second section, a UAV charger design and implementation is done via development of a TMS320F28335 DSP controlled 65 W inductive wireless power transfer circuit, and in the third section an algorithm that calculates the optimal range and route for the user-selected way points using the state of charge of the UAV's LiPo batteries and a preflight simulation using the simulated annealing method are developed. The experiments are performed in real time with an example scenario and the proposed strategy's suitability and effectiveness are verified for cooperative unmanned vehicle teams.