Cooperative communication framework design for the unmanned aerial vehicles-unmanned surface vehicles formation

Yong Ma,Yujiao Zhao,Runze Gan,Yuanzhou Zheng,Xin Qi

doi:10.1177/1687814018773668

Yong Ma, Yujiao Zhao + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.1177/1687814018773668

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With the development of technologies related to unmanned vehicles, including unmanned aerial vehicle and unmanned surface vehicle, unmanned vehicles play a pivotal role in maritime management and cruise activities. Meanwhile, lots of evidence shows that a single unmanned vehicle is not qualified for operation under complex environment, whereas the unmanned aerial vehicle–unmanned surface vehicle formation consists of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles and unmanned surface vehicles, which can enhance the performance of the single unmanned vehicle significantly. However, the cooperative operation performance of the unmanned aerial vehicle–unmanned surface vehicle formation is constrained by its communication capacity. Consequently, a cooperative communication framework is designed for the unmanned aerial vehicle–unmanned surface vehicle formation. A distributed dynamic network topology is constructed for fulfilling effective communication for the unmanned aerial vehicle–unmanned surface vehicle formation based on ad hoc network. Experiments are carried out by employing the built unmanned aerial vehicle–unmanned surface vehicle formation platform. Results verify the superiority of the designed cooperative communication framework for the unmanned aerial vehicle–unmanned surface vehicle formation.

Highlights

For the last two decades, with the rapid development of technologies in artificial intelligence, shipbuilding industry, and other fields, the unmanned aircraft, including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned surface vehicles (USVs),[1,2,3] have been playing an ever-increasing pivotal role in generous domains, including water monitoring, marine scientific research, and maritime cruising
Varying with the advanced level of the loaded equipment on the UAV–USV formation and difficulty of the task, there can be various formation forms, mainly including the formation composed of a UAV and several USVs, the formation composed of several UAVs and a USV, and the formation composed of several UAVs and several USVs
By employing a hierarchical topology network, we design a cooperative communication scheme for the UAV–USV formation, and its corresponding network architecture is shown in Figure 4, where m and n, respectively, represent the number of UAVs and USVs

Summary

Introduction

For the last two decades, with the rapid development of technologies in artificial intelligence, shipbuilding industry, and other fields, the unmanned aircraft, including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned surface vehicles (USVs),[1,2,3] have been playing an ever-increasing pivotal role in generous domains, including water monitoring, marine scientific research, and maritime cruising. The USVs are flexible and famous for their long endurance time.[4,5] USVs can provide recharge service for UAVs featured by high speed, wide viewing angle, and effective working efficiency, and UAVs qualify for performing. Advances in Mechanical Engineering aerial tasks.[6] Types of tasks executed by USVs and UAVs become more complicated. The collaborative formation of USVs–UAVs is highly valued by enormous numbers of researchers and practitioners.[7]

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