Communication‐Aware Information‐Gathering Experiments with an Unmanned Aircraft System

This paper presents single and multiaircraft flight experiments to assess an information-theoretic path planning algorithm that incorporates sensing and communication to guide an unmanned aircraft. The communication is modeled with packet erasure channels for each link in a multihop mesh network. The planning objective is to maximize the mutual information between the target state and measurements received at a single base station from all aircraft. A novel unmanned aircraft system was developed to facilitate experiments with multiple unmanned aircraft utilizing multihop mesh networking. The value of communication-aware planning was assessed through flight experiments with a single aircraft localizing a radio emitter. Additional experiments with two aircraft demonstrated and assessed the performance of the approach, showing that the improvement in sensing can be appreciable when utilizing multihop communication.

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