Abstract
For the purpose of remote command and situation awareness, multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) cooperative surveillance with a ground station via multihop communications is presented in this paper. Considering limited communication capacities, a reliable UAV-to-UAV communication relay chain is dynamically established for connectivity maintenance and real-time surveillance information transmission. Firstly, a multiple UAVs cooperative surveillance framework is constructed with history detection information and surveillance payoff estimation. Secondly, four attributes are proposed to characterize differences among UAV alternatives in communication network containing a ground station, and a novel multiple relay UAVs selection scheme based on fuzzy optimum selection is developed to achieve tradeoff between surveillance mission and connectivity maintenance. Furthermore, satisfied with collision avoidance, limited communication and UAV kinematic constraints, the optimal UAV motion plan is obtained by decentralized receding horizon control, which is solved by particle swarm optimization with elite mechanism. Simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods in multi UAVs cooperative surveillance.
Highlights
Due to the limited capacity of single unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), in the future information and network centric environment, multiple UAVs have been widely employed in military and civil applications [1,2,3,4,5]due to the feasibility and scalability in complex tasks in recent years, such as target tracking, wildlife monitoring, disaster rescue and so on
The multi UAV cooperative surveillance consists of a ground station and six UAVs, and there are ten potential targets randomly scattering in a surveillance region
Relay UAVs alternatives sequence is obtained by sorting the membership degrees of UAV alternatives to optimum alternative, which is solved by a multi-attributes decision making method, namely fuzzy optimum selection
Summary
Due to the limited capacity of single UAV, in the future information and network centric environment, multiple UAVs have been widely employed in military and civil applications [1,2,3,4,5]. Similar to rate of return map, a multiple UAVs cooperative surveillance framework with a ground station is implemented connecting with history detection information and surveillance payoff estimation in this work. Real-time surveillance information can be sent back to ground station for remote command and situation awareness, which widely exists in target monitoring, Appl. Considering the feature of network topology comprised of ground station and multi UAVs, four special attributes are proposed to represent UAV alternatives differences in relay communication systems, and relay UAV alternatives sequence can be obtained by fuzzy optimum selection [22,23,24]. For the purpose of achieving tradeoff between surveillance mission and connectivity maintenance, a novel multiple relay UAVs selection scheme is developed based on fuzzy evaluation and fuzzy optimization, and UAVs are appropriately allocated different roles over time while detection scope extending.
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