CoUAS: A Cooperative UAV Fleet Control and Monitoring Platform

Abstract

In the past decade, unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) have been widely used in various civilian applications, most of which only contain a single unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). In the near future, the cooperation of multiple UAVs is expected to play more and more important role in emerging applications. However, existing UAV control platforms are lack of good support for cooperative tasks. For example, they control multiple UAVs in a leader-follower model instead of in a more cooperative way. As a result, research teams have to build their own platforms manually from sketch to implement a specific multi-UAV application. In this paper, to facilitate the development of multi-UAV applications, we propose a general control and monitoring platform for cooperative UAV fleet, namely, CoUAS, which provides a set of cooperative services including synchronization, connectivity management, energy simulation, etc. To evaluate the proposed platform, we then implement a prototype and run a designed path planning algorithm on it. Results from both simulation and field test indicate that the proposed system is viable.