A Safety Constrained Control Framework for UAVs in GPS Denied Environment

Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) suffer from sensor drifts in GPS denied environments, which can lead to potentially dangerous situations. To avoid intolerable sensor drifts in the presence of GPS spoofing attacks, we propose a safety constrained control framework that adapts the UAV at a path re-planning level to support resilient state estimation against GPS spoofing attacks. The attack detector is used to detect GPS spoofing attacks based on the resilient state estimation and provides a switching criterion between the robust control mode and emergency control mode. To quantify the safety margin, we introduce the escape time which is defined as a safe time under which the state estimation error remains within a tolerable error with designated confidence. An attacker location tracker (ALT) is developed to track the location of the attacker and estimate the output power of the spoofing device by the unscented Kalman filter (UKF) with sliding window outputs. Using the estimates from ALT, an escape controller (ESC) is designed based on the constrained model predictive controller (MPC) such that the UAV escapes from the effective range of the spoofing device within the escape time.