Cooperative Path Planning Of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

An invaluable addition to the literature on UAV guidance and cooperative control, Cooperative Path Planning of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles is a dedicated, practical guide to computational path planning for UAVs. One of the key issues facing future development of UAVs is path planning: it is vital that swarm UAVs/MAVs can cooperate together in a coordinated manner, obeying a pre-planned course but able to react to their environment by communicating and cooperating. An optimized path is necessary in order to ensure that a UAV completes its mission efficiently, safely and successfully.

Focussing on the path planning of multiple UAVs for simultaneous arrival on target, Cooperative path Planning of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles also offers coverage of path planners that are applicable to land, sea or space-borne vehicles.

Cooperative Path Planning of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles is authored by leading researchers from Cranfield University and provides an authoritative resource for researchers, academics and engineers working in the area of cooperative systems, cooperative control and optimization particularly in the aerospace industry.

Antonios Tsourdos is a Reader in Autonomous Systems and Control and Head of the Guidance and Control Group at Cranfield. His research areas include UAV Autonomy, UAV Path Planning, Coordinated Guidance, Cooperative Control, UAV Swarm, Autonomous Sensors Network, Sensor and Data Fusion, and Vehicle Health Management. He has authored many scientific research papers and has served as a guest editor for journal special issues on 'multi-vehicle systems cooperative control with applications'; 'advances in missile guidance and control: theory and practice', and cooperative control approaches for multiple mobile robots'.

Brian A White, now Professor Emeritus at Cranfield, was until recently Head of the Department of Aerospace, Power and Sensors and also Head of the Guidance and Control Group at Cranfield. His areas of expertise are robust control, non-linear control, estimation, observer applications, inertial navigation, guidance design, soft computing and sensor and data fusion. He has published widely in the control science field, mainly on autopilot design and guidance. He has managed significant contracts in the area of guidance. He has organized and run numerous invited sessions at major control conferences and co-edited a special issue of the IFAC journal Control Engineering Practice on Control in Defence Systems. He has served as associate editor for the IMechE Journal of Aerospace Engineering (Part G), IMechE Journal of Systems and Control Engineering (Part I), and the Journal of Nonlinear Studies.

Madhavan Shanmugavel is a Research Officer within the Guidance and Control Group at Cranfield.