A cooperative control structure for UAV's executing a cooperative ground moving target engagement (CGMTE) scenario

This paper presents a cooperative control structure appropriate for cooperative tasks requiring a high degree of tightly coupled coordinated action by multiple dynamic vehicles. The method is based on the formation of a cooperative control Lvapunov function (CCLF). The CCLF is a positive definite function involving the states of the cooperating vehicles and provides a metric of the team's performance useful for higher level assignment algorithms. Low level control laws are obtained by separating the CCLF into multiple agent control functions (ACFs). Forcing the time derivative of the ACFs to be negative definite gives rise to individual control laws for each agent and assures decrement of the CCLF and therefore convergence of the team. The cooperative ground moving target engagement (CGMTE) scenario is utilized as a case study. Simulation results are shown.