Formation Control of UAVs for Positioning and Tracking of a Moving Target

Abstract: The potential of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for surveillance and military applications is significant — with continued technical advances in the field. The number of incidents where UAVs have intruded into unauthorized areas has increased in recent years and armed drones are commonly used in modern warfare. It is therefore of great interest to investigate methods for UAVs to locate and track intruder drones to prevent and counter surveillance of unauthorized areas and attacks from intruder UAVs. This master’s thesis studied how two autonomous seeker UAVs can be used cooperatively to track and pursue a target UAV. To locate the target UAV, simulated measurements from received Radio Frequency (RF) signals were used by extracting bearing and Received Signal Strength (RSS) data. To track the target and predict its future position, the study employed an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) on each seeker UAV, which acted together as a Mobile Wireless Sensor Network (MWSN). The thesis explored two formation control methods to keep the seeker UAVs in formation while pursuing the target drone. The formation methods used the predicted position of the target to produce reference positions and/or reference distances for a controller to follow. A Distributed Model Predictive Controller (DMPC) was implemented on the seeker UAVs to pursue the target while maintaining formation and avoiding collisions. The EKF, MPC, and formation methods were first evaluated individually in simulation to assess their performance and for parameter tuning. The respective modules were then combined into the complete system and tuned to achieve improved pursuit and formation in simulation. The results showed that, with the chosen parameters and with a high level of measurement noise, the seeker UAVs were able to pursue the target with a combined average distance error of less than 2 m when the target drone flew in a square pattern with a velocity of 2 m/s. The quality of the pursuit was highly affected by the increase in velocity of the target and the initial positions of the seekers, where a high velocity and a large initial deviation from the reference positions/distances resulted in poorer quality.