Development of a comprehensive software system for implementing cooperative control of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles

In this work, we focus on establishing a framework and developing a comprehensive real-time software platform for verifying and realizing flight coordination among multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The framework is capable of providing flexible architecture for design of cooperative control laws. The overall software platform incorporates the onboard real-time software for UAVs and that for the ground control station. It employs a distributed architecture to facilitate the deployment of experiments with multiple unmanned vehicles, efficient monitoring and commanding the UAVs from the ground station. The system has been successfully tested in the hardware-in-the-loop simulation and in actual flight formation experiment involving multiple UAVs.