Behavior-Based Control Hierarchy of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Swarming

Although there are many advantages associated with UAVs, the production cost as well as operation cost of one of today’s military UAV’s is an overwhelming problem. In this paper, a more basic and fundamental approach to controlling a mission of UAVs is proposed. Based on a combination of low-level behaviors, a swarming hierarchy is derived from three levels of behaviors: basic, individual and group. The proposed hierarchy enables multiple UAVs to successfully conduct a mission using a condition-based switching mechanism and relying on local interactions between each other and with minimal interactions with human controllers who only intervene when coordinating the mission-level actions [1]. From an analytical model of a point mass UAV in a 2D environment where mass, air drag force, initial speed and gravitational acceleration are constant and the only controls for the UAV are the thrust force and its banking angle, several behavior combinations are simulated in order to obtain a family of feasible solutions. The results achieved suggest that the above mentioned condition-based switching mechanism can be used and eventually applied to actual UAVs.