Communication Issues in the Cooperative Control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Abstract : Communication needs are considered for the cooperative control of unmanned aerial vehicles with resource allocation performed by a network flow which may be iterative, and may operate synchronously or asynchronously. We briefly outline single and iterative network flow assignment algorithms and their communication requirements. Then, we consider the abstracted communication framework recently incorporated into the MultiUAV simulation package to manage the communication requirements of the allocation algorithms and implementation scenarios. As an example, a model is constructed to investigate the effect of fixed communication delays on the performance of an iterative network flow implemented as a redundant, centralized optimization.