Executive Summary : | Multi-vehicle systems (MVS) are a combination of multiple vehicles, including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV), and multi-robot systems (MRS). These systems have advantages over single-vehicle systems, such as better coverage and efficient target detection. Applications include intelligent transportation networks, surveillance, rescue tasks, smart grids, and spacecraft formation. However, the stability of MVS depends on the connectivity of the underlying network, which can be affected by packet dropouts and obstacles in the path. The proposed research aims to achieve robust control performance for MVS while reducing communication channel utilization by vehicles. The first step is to propose a guidance strategy for formation control using an event-triggered strategy, which will be modified to account for obstacles in the path. The vehicles should change their formation cooperatively to avoid obstacles. The rapid development of UAV technology has led to its wide usage in civilian and military applications, including surveillance, search, border patrols, attack, agriculture, photography, and inspection. Formation control of multi-UAV is also an attractive area of research, with applications in disaster relief, construction, and surveillance during emergency times. The second objective is to solve the problem of formation control by multi-UAV for cooperative transportation of payloads. Nonlinear mathematical models like the unicycle kinematic model and constrained double integrators can be used to represent these vehicles. The proposed design is flexible and can be verified in MATLAB, followed by Software-In-The-Loop (SITL) simulations in a ROS-Gazebo-based environment. Future work will involve experimental validation for the implementation of the proposed control strategy. |