Automating the Design of Efficient Distributed Behaviours for a Swarm of UAVs

Abstract

The usage of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is gradually gaining momentum for commercial applications. The vast majority considers a single UAV, which comes with several constraints such as its range of operations or the number of sensors it can carry. Using multiple autonomous UAVs simultaneously as a swarm makes it possible to overcome these limitations. However, manually designing complex emerging behaviours like swarming is a difficult and tedious task especially for such distributed systems which performance is hardly predictable. This article therefore proposes to automate the design of UAV swarming behaviours by defining a multi-objective optimisation problem, so called Coverage of a Connected-UAV Swarm (CCUS), and designing a Q-Learning based Hyper-Heuristic (QLHH) for generating distributed CCUS heuristics. Experimental results demonstrate the capacity of QLHH to generate efficient heuristics for any instance from a given class.