A team of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is used for the dynamic encirclement of a moving target in simulation. The encirclement tactic is defined for the situation in which a target is isolated and surrounded by a group of UAVs. It may be employed by a team of UAVs to neutralize the target and restrict its movement. A combination of decentralized Linear Model Predictive Control (LMPC) and Feedback Linearization (FL) is implemented on the team of UAVs in order to accomplish dynamic encirclement around a moving target. The main contribution of this paper lays in the application of LMPC and FL to solve the problem of encirclement of a moving target using an autonomous team of UAVs in simulation.

A technique for merging 3D octree based occupancy grid maps robust to error in transformation between map reference frames is proposed and implemented. Recent robotics applications require 3D representations of the environments in which robots are to operate. In many cases, such as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) and when a large environment is required to be mapped within a reasonable time constraint, it is not feasible for a single robot to map the entire portion of the environment required to be mapped. In these cases it is necessary for a team of robots to build maps independently and merge them into a single global map. The contribution of this work lies in the introduction of methods which use map data from commonly mapped portions of the environment with registration techniques such that maps may still be merged coherently despite erroneous relative transformations between maps. The results from this paper demonstrate that not only are octree occupancy grids a suitable representation for multi-robot 3D mapping, but that the proposed techniques for improving erroneous transformation estimates between map frames are valid.

To facilitate modular development, the use of state machines has been proposed to specify the protocol (i.e., the sequence of messages) that each port of a component can engage in. The protocol conformance checking problem consists of determining whether the actual behavior of a component conforms to the protocol specifications on its ports. In this paper, we consider this problem in the context of the model-driven development (MDD) of embedded systems based on UML 2, in which UML 2 state machines are used to specify component behavior. We provide a definition of conformance which slightly extends those found in the literature and reduce the conformance check to a state space exploration. We describe a tool implementing the approach using the Java PathFinder software model checker and the MDD tool IBM Rational RoseRT, discuss its application to three case studies, and show how the tool repeatedly allowed us to find unexpected conformance errors with encouraging performance. We conclude that the approach is promising for supporting the modular development of embedded components in the context of industrial applications of MDD.