Practical Distributed Control for Cooperative VTOL UAVs Within a 3-D Roundabout

Abstract

With the rapid development of uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) technology in recent years, research on large-scale low-altitude UAV air traffic management (ATM) has gained attention. Unlike the traditional ATM, the number of small UAVs in the airspace may be in the millions, making air traffic management challenging. In an ATM, airspace is composed of airways, intersections, and nodes. In this paper, a three-dimensional (3-D) roundabout model is utilized as an airspace structure for air traffic intersections of known traffic network models, which is decomposed into a central island, several ramps, and buffer zones. In this paper, for simplicity, the distributed coordination of the motions of Vertical TakeOff and Landing (VTOL) UAVs to pass through a 3-D roundabout is focused on, which is formulated as a 3-D roundabout passing-through problem. The corresponding control objectives include inter-agent conflict-free, keeping within the 3-D curved virtual tube, and avoiding local minima. Lyapunov-like functions are designed elaborately, and formal analysis is made to show that all UAVs can pass through the 3-D roundabout without getting trapped. Taking the kinematic model of VTOL UAVs into consideration, the horizontal control and attitude control channels are decoupled, which is more reasonable for practical applications. Numerical simulation and real experiment are given to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.