UAV Cooperative Decision and Control

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used in military missions because they have the advantages of not placing human life at risk and of lowering operation costs. These benefits can be fully realized only if UAVs work cooperatively in groups with an efficient exchange of information. This book provides an authoritative reference on cooperative decision and control of UAVs and the means available to solve problems involving them. The book is aimed at helping practitioners, students, and academicians alike to better understand what cooperative decision and control is and its applications and methods for implementing algorithms that make cooperative UAV operations possible. The approach of this book is to present the UAV cooperative decision and control problem in a manner that abstracts the challenges from the concrete problems, making it possible to leverage the solution methods over a broader range of applications.

Tal Shima is a senior lecturer with the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the Technion?Israel Institute of Technology and is a Horev Fellow in the institute?s Leaders in Science and Technology program. His research interests include cooperative decision and control for unmanned systems; missile guidance, control, and estimation; differential games; sensor networks; and optimization. Steven J. Rasmussen is employed by Miami Valley Aerospace, LLC, as a consultant to the United States Air Force Research Laboratory?s Control Science Center of Excellence. He is also Technical Director of RasSimTech, LTD, a simulation software company.