Multi-Vehicle Cooperative Control Flight Test

During the spring and summer of 2005, the autonomous flight systems laboratory at the University of Washington and Boeing St. Louis developed and flight tested control software for the Boeing multi-vehicle UAV Testbed. The goal of this collaboration was to demonstrate the ability of a team of UAVs to autonomously allocate a set of targets among the team and fly to the targets while avoiding designated areas. A distributed architecture was used maximizing the benefits of increased autonomy in the areas of task allocation and path planning. The real-time decision making component consists of the evolution-based cooperative planning system (ECoPS) developed under DARPA funding. The approach was demonstrated in simulations and in a flight test at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri