Health Management, Fault-tolerant Control, and Cooperative Control of Unmanned Systems

Brief statement of the workshop goals:

Unmanned systems including Unmanned Aerial Vehicles/Systems (UAVs or UAS), Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs), and Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) etc are gaining more and more attention during the last a few years due to their important contribution and cost-effective application in several tasks such as surveillance, search, rescue missions, geographic studies, military and security applications. Health management and fault-tolerant control of manned aerial vehicles have a long history since the initial research on self-repairing flight control systems in US Air Force and NASA begun in mid-1980s. However, due to safety of manned aerial vehicles to the pilot, experimental test and further practical research and development have been bounded due to such constraints. Benefited from the recent and significant advance and development of UAVs, development and application of fault-tolerant control as well as cooperative control techniques have been emerged and developed quickly in recent years, since UAVs provide a cheap and operative experimental test-bed for development, implementation, and testing the latest developed fault-tolerant and cooperative guidance, navigation and control techniques. Based on the experiences gained by the 9 different participating organizations ranging from academic institutions, research organization, and industry of the leading groups in Canada, USA, France, Spain, and UK, the workshop will demonstrate the state-of-the-art techniques and development in health management, fault diagnosis, fault-tolerant guidance, navigation and control, safety and reliability, as well as multi-vehicle cooperative guidance, navigation and control techniques.

In this workshop, overview of past, current and future research activities and research outcomes on the health management, fault diagnosis, fault-tolerant control, and cooperative control applications with emphasis to UAVs will be presented, which include quadrotor rotary and fixed-wing UAVs etc. Linear and nonlinear techniques for modeling, fault diagnosis, fault-tolerant control, path and trajectory planning/re-planning, cooperative/formation flight guidance, navigation and control, based on a quadrotor helicopter UAV and several fixed-wing UAVs testbeds will be presented in the workshop. Furthermore, health management, fault-tolerant control, and cooperative control strategies development with practical application scenarios on persistent surveillance and coverage control with multiple unmanned systems will be presented. Multiple UAS operations toward verifiable autonomy and assessment of the potential insertion of UAS in the air transportation system will also be discussed.

Audience will gain information and knowledge on the latest development and applications on the active research topics in health management, fault detection and diagnosis, fault-tolerant control and cooperative control of unmanned aerial vehicles from world-leading researchers.