Decentralized cooperative urban tracking of multiple ground targets by a team of autonomous UAVs

This research is concerned with tracking moving ground targets, in an urban domain, using autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The sharing of information amongst the UAVs is constrained by communication radius. A dynamic decentralized cooperative control strategy is implemented, in order for the UAVs to autonomously plan (and re-plan) their trajectories in response to (and in anticipation of) target movement in the urban domain. In this decentralized approach, each UAV plans its route through a dynamic feedback loop in a receding horizon framework. We note that it is possible that no UAV has a complete understanding of the region of interest, which better models the real-world environment.