Cooperative Guidance for Aerial Defense in Multiagent Systems

This paper addresses a critical aerial defense challenge in contested airspace, involving three autonomous aerial vehicles -- a hostile drone (the pursuer), a high-value drone (the evader), and a protective drone (the defender). We present a cooperative guidance framework for the evader-defender team that guarantees interception of the pursuer before it can capture the evader, even under highly dynamic and uncertain engagement conditions. Unlike traditional heuristic, optimal control, or differential game-based methods, we approach the problem within a time-constrained guidance framework, leveraging true proportional navigation based approach that ensures robust and guaranteed solutions to the aerial defense problem. The proposed strategy is computationally lightweight, scalable to a large number of agent configurations, and does not require knowledge of the pursuer's strategy or control laws. From arbitrary initial geometries, our method guarantees that key engagement errors are driven to zero within a fixed time, leading to a successful mission. Extensive simulations across diverse and adversarial scenarios confirm the effectiveness of the proposed strategy and its relevance for real-time autonomous defense in contested airspace environments.

Model-Free and Real-Time Bioinspired Unicycle-Based Source Seeking: Differential Wheeled Robotic Experiments

Bioinspred robots aimed at source-seeking are often studied, and their controls designed, using unicycle modeling and formulation. This is true not only for model-based controllers, but also for model-free, real-time control methods such as extremum seeking control (ESC). In this paper, we propose a unicycle-based ESC design applicable to differential wheeled robots that: (1) is very simple design, based on one simple control-affine law, and without state integrators; (2) attenuates oscillations known to persist in ESC designs (i.e., fully stop at the source); and (3) operates in a model-free, real-time setting, tolerating environmental/sensor noise. We provide simulation and real-world robotic experimental results for fixed and moving light source seeking by a differential wheeled robot using our proposed design. Results indicate clear advantages of our proposed design when compared to the literature, including attenuation of undesired oscillations, improved convergence speed, and better handling of noise.

Model-Free Source Seeking by a Novel Single-Integrator with Attenuating Oscillations and Better Convergence: Robotic Experiments

The classic extremum seeking control (ESC) system has been used, including in experiments, for over a decade as a mean for model-free, real-time method to steer systems, such as mobile robots, to the source of a scalar physical distribution (signal) using only local measurements of said signal. This is referred to in literature as the (source seeking) problem. Similarly, control-affine ESC systems, which are simpler in structure such as single-integrator, have been used for source seeking as well; however, they were rarely experimented on. Both classic ESC and control-affine ESC methods suffer from persistent oscillations even after the system approaches the source they are seeking. In this paper, we implement, and verify by novel robotic experiments, recent results on control-affine ESC, which enable source seeking with attenuating oscillations. We propose a simple, amended single-integrator design which we use in our experiments. The experiments were conducted for a light source seeking problem. Results imply that the proposed design has significant potential as it also demonstrated much better convergence. We hope this paper encourages expansion of the proposed design in other fields, problems and experiments.