DEVELOPMENT OF INTELLIGENT HYBRID ARCHITECTURE FOR AUTONOMOUS UAV.

The emerging area of intelligent unmanned aerial vehicle research has shown rapid development in recent years and offers a great number of research challenges for distributed autonomous robotics systems. However, with the development of more complex robots that must operate in uncontrolled and dynamic environments, an autonomous UAV is understood to be intelligent robot capable of performing complex operations in dynamic, real-world, uncertain, sometimes hostile environments without any explicit human control over its movements and must constantly recon?gure itself to adapt to the external conditions and its own goals. To provide the aerial vehicles with these capabilities, robot control architecture is necessary. The challenge is to develop a UAV control system capable of obtaining intelligent, suitable responses to changing environments and adapt the software to the current situation. The de?nition of control architecture to manage these recon?gurations becomes of paramount importance for increasing the level of autonomy and successful navigation of such robots. The Control architectures define how these abilities should be integrated to construct and develop an autonomous navigation with little or no human intervention. Numerous intelligent control architectures do exist in the literature for mobile robots. However, none of these are specifically targeted at providing the required support for a wide range of UAV missions. Operations of UAV require robust methods for dealing with emergency scenarios such as performing forced landings and collision. In this work, we firstly study and analyze the different architectures adopted in the literature, on the basis of their flexibility, ease of implementation, reactivity, robustness, efficiency and other architecture specifications. This analysis led us to propose intelligent and hierarchical control architecture, decentralized, generic and reusable, applicable to autonomous aerial vehicles flying in an unknown, dynamic and potentially hostile environment; our control is a hybrid architecture based on multi-agent technology (MAS), which can handle unpredictable events in an unstructured world, composed of distributed, independent and asynchronous behaviors. In addition, it integrates multiple knowledge representation approaches to build cognitive models and intelligent systems that significantly advance the level of intelligence we can achieve. Our architecture is a family of intelligent control systems, hybrid and decomposed into flexible autonomous subsystems, its containing elements of sensory processing, world modeling, localization, Mission planning & high level Expert system, and action processes to achieve or maintain its goals. The reactive part will guarantee that simple tasks are achieved under time constraints (real-time) while deliberative part will grant planning and reasoning. The whole architecture assures the safety of the UAV and the environment, so it provides the mechanisms to deal and reduces the impact with hardware and software failures of onboard.