Federated DyKnow, a Distributed Information Fusion System for Collaborative UAVs

Abstract—As unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications are becoming more complex and covering larger physical areas there is an increasing need for multiple UAVs to cooperatively solve problems. To produce more complete and accurate information about the environment we present the DyKnow Federation framework for distributed fusion among collaborative UAVs. A federation is created and maintained using a multi-agent delegation framework which allows high-level specification and reasoning about resource bounded cooperative problem solving. When the federation is set up, local information is transparently shared between the agents according to specification. The work is presented in the context of a multi-UAV traffic monitoring scenario. 1 Index Terms—Distributed information fusion, multi-agent systems, autonomous systems. In many robotic applications, having one agent execute