Toward secure, efficient, and seamless reconfiguration of UAV swarm formations

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial vehicles (UAVs) have gained a lot of interest over the last years due to the many fields of potential application. Nowadays, researchers are becoming interested in groups of UAVs working together. The collaborations between UAVs open a wide field of opportunities, because they are typically able to do more sophisticated tasks than a single UAV. However, collaboration between multiple UAVs is still a complex task, and significant challenges need to be addressed before their mainstream adoption. For instance, the automatic reconfiguration of a swarm can be used to adapt the swarm to changing application demands to solve a task in a more efficient and effective manner. However, the chances of collision become high if reconfiguration is not carefully planned. In this work we propose an approach to allow changing the shape of a UAV formation during flight through a computational inexpensive method that is able to decrease collision chances significantly. During the experiments we tested different reconfiguration events that are prone to collisions. Results have shown that our approach maintains a safe distance (greater than 5 meters) between the UAVs, while keeping the time overhead limited to a few tenths of a second. Furthermore, scalability tests have proven that our approach can handle the reconfiguration of at least 25 UAVs simultaneously.