An Integrated Architecture for Distributed Estimation, Navigation and Control of Aerospace Systems

Distributed autonomous systems have demonstrated many advantageous features over their centralized counterparts. In exchange for their scalability and robustness, there are additional complexities in obtaining a global behavior from local interactions. These complexities stem from a coordination problem while being provided a limited information set. Despite this information constraint, it is still desirable for agents to construct an estimate of the entire system for coordination purposes. This work proposes an architecture for the coordination and control of a multi-agent system while being limited in external communication. This architecture will examine how to internally estimate states, assign goals, and finally execute a suitable control. These techniques are first applied to a simple linear model and then extended to non-linear domains. Specific aerospace applications are explored where there exists a need for accuracy and precision.