UAV swarm coordination using cooperative control for establishing a wireless communications backbone

In this paper, we present a mechanism to fly a swarm of UAVs with the aim of establishing a wireless backbone over a pre-specified area. The backbone is aimed at connecting intermittent wireless-signal-emitting mobile ground stations (GSs), comprising rescue teams and survivors. To this end, we present a decentralized behavior-based cooperative control architecture to search for unknown GSs and relay packets from one GS to another. A delay tolerant network protocol implementation is assumed on the agents but maintained transparent to the GSs. The conditions for agent state transition are adapted to maximize a measured performance score. A novel belief exchange mechanism for cooperation is designed to utilize low bandwidth through state estimation by a Dynamic Cell Structure. Extensive simulations are performed to prove the effectiveness of the proposed solution via measured performance metrics like average latency and visit frequency. Categories and Subject Descriptors I.2.11 [Computi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Achudhan Sivakumar, Colin Keng-Yan Tan
• Keywords: ATAL 2010, Behavior-based Cooperative Control, Cooperative Control, Intelligent Agents, Unknown Gss