UAV Control Architecture: Review

Abstract

Since civil Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are expected to perform a wide rang of mission, the subject of designing an efficient control architecture for autonomous UAV is a very challenging problem. Several contributions had been done in order to implement an autonomous UAV. The key challenge of all these contributions is to develop the global strategy. Robotic control approaches could be classified into six categories: Deliberative, Reactive, Hybrid, Behavior, Hybrid Behavior and subsumption approach. In this paper, we will review the existing control architectures to extract the main features of civil UAVs. The definition, advantage and drawback of each architecture will be highlighted to finally provide a comparative study of the mentioned control approaches.