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.
swarm coordination cooperative control teamwork disaster relief dtn