UAV trajectory control with rule-based minimum-energy reference generation

This paper deals with the hierarchical real-time control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with rule-based strategy for mission time and energetic references generator based on optimal control theory. The objective of this work is to design a control which ensures an energy consumption close to the optimality, and easily implementable thanks to its low computational cost. The first part of the work deals with the extraction of simple and immediate rules for the determination of the optimal mission time, and the generation of 'energetic trajectories' from the analysis of the optimal control strategy results, to minimize the consumption over a high heterogeneous amount of simulations. Then, a hierarchical real-time controller is proposed to track desired energetic trajectories, identified as optimal. The results provided are validated through numerical experiments and compared in terms of energy performance with the optimal solution.