Autonomous Cooperative Flight Control for Airship Swarms
This work addresses control challenges for airship swarms, which is an incremental advancement in domain-specific robotics.
The paper tackled autonomous cooperative flight control for airship swarms by comparing formation flight and swarm intelligence approaches for tasks like waypoint path following and ground moving target tracking, with results indicating the swarm intelligence method offers greater flexibility.
This work investigates two approaches for the design of autonomous cooperative flight controllers for airship swarms. The first controller is based on formation flight and the second one is based on swarm intelligence strategies. In both cases, the team of airships needs to perform two different tasks: waypoint path following and ground moving target tracking. The UAV platform considered in this work is the NOAMAY airship developed in Brazil. We use a simulated environment to test the proposed approaches. Results show the inherent flexibility of the swarm intelligence approach on both tasks.