A Survey on Aerial Swarm Robotics

The use of aerial swarms to solve real-world problems has been increasing steadily, accompanied by falling prices and improving performance of communication, sensing, and processing hardware. The commoditization of hardware has reduced unit costs, thereby lowering the barriers to entry to the field of aerial swarm robotics. A key enabling technology for swarms is the family of algorithms that allow the individual members of the swarm to communicate and allocate tasks amongst themselves, plan their trajectories, and coordinate their flight in such a way that the overall objectives of the swarm are achieved efficiently. These algorithms, often organized in a hierarchical fashion, endow the swarm with autonomy at every level, and the role of a human operator can be reduced, in principle, to interactions at a higher level without direct intervention. This technology depends on the clever and innovative application of theoretical tools from control and estimation. This paper reviews the state of the art of these theoretical tools, specifically focusing on how they have been developed for, and applied to, aerial swarms. Aerial swarms differ from swarms of ground-based vehicles in two respects: they operate in a three-dimensional space and the dynamics of individual vehicles adds an extra layer of complexity. We review dynamic modeling and conditions for stability and controllability that are essential in order to achieve cooperative flight and distributed sensing. The main sections of this paper focus on major results covering trajectory generation, task allocation, adversarial control, distributed sensing, monitoring, and mapping. Wherever possible, we indicate how the physics and subsystem technologies of aerial robots are brought to bear on these individual areas

UAV flight coordination for communication networks:Genetic algorithms versus game theory

The autonomous coordinated flying for groups of unmanned aerial vehicles that maximise network coverage to mobile ground-based units by efficiently utilising the available on-board power is a complex problem. Their coordination involves the fulfilment of multiple objectives that are directly dependent on dynamic, unpredictable and uncontrollable phenomena. In this paper, two systems are presented and compared based on their ability to reposition fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles to maintain a useful airborne wireless network topology. Genetic algorithms and non-cooperative games are employed for the generation of optimal flying solutions. The two methods consider realistic kinematics for hydrocarbon-powered medium-altitude, long-endurance aircrafts. Coupled with a communication model that addresses environmental conditions, they optimise flying to maximising the number of supported ground-based units. Results of large-scale scenarios highlight the ability of genetic algorithms to evolve flexible sets of manoeuvres that keep the flying vehicles separated and provide optimal solutions over shorter settling times. In comparison, game theory is found to identify strategies of predefined manoeuvres that maximise coverage but require more time to converge

Guaranteed Road Network Search with Small Unmanned Aircraft

The use of teams of small unmanned aircraft in real-world rapid-response missions is fast becoming a reality. One such application is search and detection of an evader in urban areas. This paper draws on results in graph-based pursuit-evasion, developing mappings from these abstractions to primitive motions that may be performed by aircraft, to produce search strategies providing guaranteed capture of road-bound targets. The first such strategy is applicable to evaders of arbitrary speed and agility, offering a conservative solution that is insensitive to motion constraints pursuers may possess. This is built upon to generate two strategies for capture of targets having a known speed bound that require searcher teams of much smaller size. The efficacy of these algorithms is demonstrated by evaluation in extensive simulation using realistic vehicle models across a spectrum of environment classes

Optimization and Communication in UAV Networks

UAVs are becoming a reality and attract increasing attention. They can be remotely controlled or completely autonomous and be used alone or as a fleet and in a large set of applications. They are constrained by hardware since they cannot be too heavy and rely on batteries. Their use still raises a large set of exciting new challenges in terms of trajectory optimization and positioning when they are used alone or in cooperation, and communication when they evolve in swarm, to name but a few examples. This book presents some new original contributions regarding UAV or UAV swarm optimization and communication aspects

Artificial Intelligence Empowered UAVs Data Offloading in Mobile Edge Computing

The advances introduced by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are manifold and have paved the path for the full integration of UAVs, as intelligent objects, into the Internet of Things (IoT). This paper brings artificial intelligence into the UAVs data offloading process in a multi-server Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) environment, by adopting principles and concepts from game theory and reinforcement learning. Initially, the autonomous MEC server selection for partial data offloading is performed by the UAVs, based on the theory of the stochastic learning automata. A non-cooperative game among the UAVs is then formulated to determine the UAVs\u27 data to be offloaded to the selected MEC servers, while the existence of at least one Nash Equilibrium (NE) is proven exploiting the power of submodular games. A best response dynamics framework and two alternative reinforcement learning algorithms are introduced that converge to a NE, and their trade-offs are discussed. The overall framework performance evaluation is achieved via modeling and simulation, in terms of its efficiency and effectiveness, under different operation approaches and scenarios