Hybrid System Project - Dec.2016
The goal of this project is to design an aircraft controller that navigates the aircraft from source to destination while ensuring that it does not collide with other aircraft in its path. The controller gets information about the current location and the target location of the aircraft. Further, it receives messages from aircraft in its vicinity and uses this information to navigate the aircraft and avoid collision with other aircraft
In this project, we will look at a simplified controller design problem as follows:
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The aircraft will fly in a 2-D plane. Its source and destination are integer-valued points in the plane.
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The aircraft flies with a constant velocity v=1km/minuate along either X-axis or Y-axis.
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The aircraft controller can update direction of flight every k=1 minutes. Note that, it can decide to either fly straight or rotate left or right by 90 degrees but not turn back.
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At the beginning of every k=1 minutes, The controller can exchange messages with any aircraft in a square region with side length 2q=4km (communication zone) in the vicinity of the aircraft as shown in the figure 1. Based on the messages received and the current state of the aircraft, the controller can update the direction of flight
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Collision Avoidance: Each aircraft has a square region with side length 2d=1km ( danger zone ) around it such that no aircraft should enter this region at any time during the flight as shown in figure 1.
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The source locations are distinct locations for different aircraft.
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Once an aircraft reaches its destination, it is no longer a threat and collision avoidance is not required for this aircraft. Also, the air craft stops sending messages to the other aircraft in its vicinity.
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Further, we assume that the airspace consists only of two aircraft that start at time t=0. The goal here is to design a controller ( same algorithm for both aircraft ) that ensures that each aircraft reaches its destination in as small time as possible while ensuring collision avoidance. In the problem, the sources and destinations for aircraft are provided as parameters and the designed controller should work with all such sourcedestination pairs.