An Event-Driven Software Architecture for Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to Cooperatively Locate Mobile Targets

Today’s state-of-the-art, real-time distributed systems require sophisticated software engineering techniques to support a diverse set of mission requirements. This chapter discusses an event-driven approach to the design of such systems in the context of a fully-functional search and localization application intended for unmanned aerial vehicles. Here, the discussion focuses on the basic design principles that form the foundation of the distributed, scalable, and cross-platform implementation, and it provides an evaluation of the system’s performance on a set of representative tasks. The main contribution of this effort consists of a modular software framework that is well-suited for solving problems in distributed intelligence and autonomous robotic systems. This framework is an enabling technology that integrates different functional components, such as sensing, analysis, and control into one cohesive platform. This solution employs off-the-shelf commercial technologies, resulting in a low-cost implementation that exhibits both robustness and flexibility.