Abstract

In this thesis, the problem of employing multiple UAVs for carrying out a Coordinated Strike and a Multiple UAV Surveillance mission has been addressed. The goal of the Coordinated Strike mission is for multiple UAVs to cooperate in order to simultaneously arrive at a high priority target to carry out a coordinated strike. The coordination strategy is based on coordination variables and coordination functions. A distributed system architecture is proposed that allows vehicles to communicate coordinating information across the team without reliance on a central ground controller. Simulations have been conducted to illustrate the performance of the coordination strategy under an actuator fault in single and multiple vehicles. The Multiple UAV Surveillance problem has been investigated by developing a hypothetical Border Surveillance Mission, wherein a UAV team is tasked to monitor a region along a border between two countries. The goal of the UAVs is to cover the entire surveillance region, while minimizing the team cost, which is a function of each vehicle's fuel consumption and mission time. Three fault cases in a single vehicle in the team have been simulated, namely (1) actuator; (2) sensor; and (3) simultaneous actuator and sensor faults. These faults necessitate a resource allocation problem to be solved, which is used to determine the configuration of the team engaged in the surveillance mission. The team chosen to perform the surveillance mission is the one that incurs the minimum cost for performing the mission.