An Analysis Method for Merging of UAVs that Guarantees the Robustness against Trajectory Uncertainty

Abstract

This paper proposes a deterministic approach to decide the feasibility of a merging problem of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with a cluster of UAVs that has uncertainty in its velocity. We model the UAVs system yielding decentralized control laws as a mixed logical dynamical system whereby the merging problem is formulated as a mixed-integer convex program to calculate the optimal initial velocity for maximizing the allowable uncertainty. By communalizing certain 0—1 variables in the formulated problem, our approach guarantees the robust feasibility of merging within the calculated uncertainty. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated through numerical simulations.