A multilayer control architecture for unmanned aerial vehicles

In the past several years there has been a lot of interest in the design of efficient autonomous intelligent controllers for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). This is a very challenging problem since future UAVs will be expected to complete autonomously a wide variety of complex missions, and achieve performance comparable to that of the manned vehicles. In this paper we describe and discuss the issues arising in autonomous intelligent control of UAVs. It is shown that the related problems can be effectively addressed within a framework of a four-layer hierarchical control architecture. The layers integrate the following autonomous functions: (1) fault-tolerant redundancy management; (2) trajectory generation; (3) path planning; and (4) decision making. The resulting multilayer control architecture is described in detail.