MUSCOP: Mission-Based UAV Swarm Coordination Protocol

Abstract

Nowadays, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become the preferred, and sometimes the only support tool when facing critical scenarios such as earthquakes, search and rescue missions, and border surveillance. In these scenarios, deploying a UAV swarm instead of a single UAV can provide additional benefits when, for example, cargo carrying requirements exceed the lifting power of a single UAV, or when the deployment of several UAVs simultaneously can accelerate the accomplishment of the mission, and broaden the covered area. To this aim, in this paper we present MUSCOP, a protocol that allows multiple UAVs to perfectly coordinate their flight when performing planned missions. Experimental results show that the proposed protocol is able to achieve a high degree of swarm cohesion independently of the swarm formation adopted, and even in the presence of very lossy channels, achieving minimal synchronization delays and very low position offsets with regard to the ideal case.