Area exploration with a swarm of UAVs combining deterministic chaotic ant colony mobility with position MPC

The recent advances in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) technology permit to develop new usages for them. One of the current challenges is to operate UAVs as an autonomous swarm. In this domain we already proposed a new mobility model using Ant Colony Algorithms combined with chaotic dynamics (CACOC) to enhance the coverage of an area by a swarm of UAVs. In this paper we propose to consider this mobility model as waypoints for real UAVs. A control model of the UAVs is deployed to test the efficiency of the coverage of an area by the swarm. We have tested our approach in a realistic robotics simulator (V-Rep) which is connected with ROS. We compare the performance in terms of coverage using several metrics to ensure that this mobility model is efficient for real UAVs.

[1]  Martin Rosalie.  Templates and subtemplates of R\"ossler attractors from a bifurcation diagram , 2016 .

[2]  Miguel A. Olivares-Méndez,et al.  A real-time model predictive position control with collision avoidance for commercial low-cost quadrotors , 2016, 2016 IEEE Conference on Control Applications (CCA).

[3]  Pascal Bouvry,et al.  Connectivity Stability in Autonomous Multi-level UAV Swarms for Wide Area Monitoring , 2015, DIVANet@MSWiM.

[4]  Surya P. N. Singh,et al.  V-REP: A versatile and scalable robot simulation framework , 2013, 2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[5]  Kevin M. Passino,et al.  Swarm Coordination and Control Problems , 2011 .

[6]  Marco Dorigo,et al.  Optimization, Learning and Natural Algorithms , 1992 .

[7]  Pascal Bouvry,et al.  UAV fleet area coverage with network connectivity constraint , 2013, MobiWac '13.

[8]  Toshiyuki Ohtsuka,et al.  A continuation/GMRES method for fast computation of nonlinear receding horizon control , 2004, Autom..

[9]  Moritz Diehl,et al.  A real‐time algorithm for nonlinear receding horizon control using multiple shooting and continuation/Krylov method , 2009 .

[10]  Sylvain Bertrand,et al.  MPC Strategies for Cooperative Guidance of Autonomous Vehicles , 2014 .

[11]  O. Rössler.  An equation for continuous chaos , 1976 .

[12]  Nikhil Nigam,et al.  The Multiple Unmanned Air Vehicle Persistent Surveillance Problem: A Review , 2014 .

[13]  Simin Nadjm-Tehrani,et al.  Mobility Models for UAV Group Reconnaissance Applications , 2006, 2006 International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Communications (ICWMC'06).

[14]  Eric Bonabeau,et al.  Swarm Intelligence: A New C2 Paradigm with an Application to Control Swarms of UAVs , 2003 .

[15]  Serge Chaumette,et al.  From Random Process to Chaotic Behavior in Swarms of UAVs , 2016, DIVANet@MSWiM.

[16]  Pascal Bouvry,et al.  Management of an academic HPC cluster: The UL experience , 2014, 2014 International Conference on High Performance Computing & Simulation (HPCS).

[17]  Gregory R. Madey,et al.  Swarm Control of UAVs for Cooperative Hunting with DDDAS , 2013, ICCS.

[18]  Xin-She Yang,et al.  Firefly algorithm with chaos , 2013, Commun. Nonlinear Sci. Numer. Simul..

[19]  Xin-She Yang,et al.  Chaos-enhanced accelerated particle swarm optimization , 2013, Commun. Nonlinear Sci. Numer. Simul..