A behavior based control system for surveillance UAVs

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is required to carry out duties such as surveillance, reconnaissance, search and rescue and security patrol missions. Autonomous operation of UAVs is a key to the success of thesemissions. In this chapter, we propose to use a behavior based control architecture to implement autonomous operation for UAV surveillance missions. This control architecture consists of two layers: a low level control layer and a behavior layer. The low level control layer decomposes 3D motion of UAVs into several atomic actions, such as yaw, roll, pitch, altitude, and 2D position control. These atomic actions together serve as a basis for the behavior layer. The behavior layer consists of a number of necessary behaviors used for surveillance missions, including take-off, object tracking, hovering, landing, trajectory following, obstacle avoidance amongst other behaviors. These behaviors can be instantiated individually or collectively to fulfill the required missions issued by human operators. To evaluate the proposed control architecture, the commercially available DraganFlyer QuadRotor was used as the UAV platform.With the aid of an indoor positioning system, several atomic actions and a group of behaviors were developed for the DraganFlyer. Real testing experiments were conducted to demonstrate the feasibility and performance of the proposed system.