Information Sharing in Cooperative Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Teams

This paper considers the problem of cooperative search and task response in a heterogeneous team of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with limited communication. The UAVs are engaged in a mission to search and verifiably destroy targets in an uncertain environment. The UAVs do not have access to centralized information, and each UAV makes its decisions based on subjective information obtained through observation and communication with other UAVs. We present a strategy for information sharing and fusion, and study the impact of this strategy's parameters on the performance of the UAV team.

[1]  Marios M. Polycarpou,et al.  COOPERATIVE REAL-TIME TASK ALLOCATION AMONG GROUPS OF UAVS* , 2004 .

[2]  B. Moor,et al.  Mixed integer programming for multi-vehicle path planning , 2001, 2001 European Control Conference (ECC).

[3]  Luca Maria Gambardella,et al.  Ant Algorithms for Discrete Optimization , 1999, Artificial Life.

[4]  Marios M. Polycarpou,et al.  Balancing search and target response in cooperative unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) teams , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B (Cybernetics).

[5]  Kevin M. Passino,et al.  Cooperative scheduling of tasks for networked uninhabited autonomous vehicles , 2003, 42nd IEEE International Conference on Decision and Control (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37475).

[6]  Béla Bollobás,et al.  Random Graphs , 1985 .

[7]  M. Pachter,et al.  Research issues in autonomous control of tactical UAVs , 1998, Proceedings of the 1998 American Control Conference. ACC (IEEE Cat. No.98CH36207).

[8]  Wright-Patterson Afb,et al.  UAV Cooperative Path Planning , 2000 .

[9]  S. Redner,et al.  Introduction To Percolation Theory , 2018 .

[10]  Albert-László Barabási,et al.  Statistical mechanics of complex networks , 2001, ArXiv.

[11]  E. Fernandez-Gaucherand,et al.  Cooperative control for UAV's searching risky environments for targets , 2003, 42nd IEEE International Conference on Decision and Control (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37475).

[12]  Marios M. Polycarpou,et al.  A cooperative search framework for distributed agents , 2001, Proceeding of the 2001 IEEE International Symposium on Intelligent Control (ISIC '01) (Cat. No.01CH37206).

[13]  Timothy W. McLain,et al.  Multiple UAV cooperative search under collision avoidance and limited range communication constraints , 2003, 42nd IEEE International Conference on Decision and Control (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37475).