Ad-hoc network of unmanned aerial vehicle swarms for search & destroy tasks

Abstract

An ad-hoc network of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is modeled as a swarm of birds. Flock formation observed among birds in nature inspires the control of these UAVs, which perform a search and destroy task involving multiple, moving targets. The proposed control model is decentralized, adaptive and self-organizing to deal with the dynamic and distributed nature of the problem and relies only on local sensing and minimal communications to account for potential limitations in terms of global communications and lack of global information related to the task. The proposed model is tested for its self-organization capabilities in various simulation environments involving various number of UAVs and targets. These simulation show that the nature inspired control model is effective, robust and scalable in the context of the search and destroy tasks. Further simulations show that, because of the physical proximity of the UAVs within a swarm, a very good and robust routing performance can be achieved for these local, intra-swarm communications.