Abstract
A novel fault-tolerant communication topology management method for the leader–follower unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) formation is proposed to minimize the formation communication cost while keeping the formation shape, even in the case of communication faults during the formation flight. This method is based on Edmonds’ algorithm for the minimum cost arborescence problem in graph theory. When a formation shape is given before the formation flight, this method can get the optimal initial communication topology with the minimum formation communication cost for keeping the formation shape. When some communication faults occur during the formation flight, which will cause the formation shape cannot be kept, this method can reconfigure the communication topology in time to guarantee the safety of all UAVs and recover the formation shape, and then it can reoptimize the communication topology by UAV position reconfiguration in the formation shape to minimize the formation communication cost for continuously keeping the formation shape. The effectiveness of this method is demonstrated through several simulation experiments.
Highlights
The cooperative decision and control of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have drawn considerable attention from the scientific and engineering communities in recent years due to their wide potential applications in many fields, such as joint search and track,[1] persistent surveillance,[2] localization and navigation,[3] environmental monitoring,[4] ground target attack,[5] and so on
Some communication faults may occur during the formation flight, which will cause that some communication links in the communication topology become unusable and the formation shape cannot be kept
An efficient fault-tolerant communication topology management method is beneficial and necessary for a UAV formation to minimize the total cost of the communication links in the communication topology while keeping the formation shape even when some communication faults occur during the formation flight
Summary
The cooperative decision and control of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have drawn considerable attention from the scientific and engineering communities in recent years due to their wide potential applications in many fields, such as joint search and track,[1] persistent surveillance,[2] localization and navigation,[3] environmental monitoring,[4] ground target attack,[5] and so on. À is proposed to get the optimal initial communication topology for a given formation shape before the formation flight This method can guarantee that the whole communication path for all of the following UAVs is the shortest compared to the method in the studies of Giulietti et al and Pollini et al the computation complexity of the algorithm is relatively high, and it needs to artificially specify the formation leader in advance. The reconfigured formation communication topology may not be optimal because there is no communication topology reoptimization by UAV position reconfiguration in the formation shape as in the studies of Giulietti et al and Pollini et al. to overcome the shortcomings in the existing research literatures, this article proposes a novel faulttolerant communication topology management method under communication faults for the leader–follower UAV formation, which is based on Edmonds’ algorithm for the minimum cost arborescence (MCA) problem in graph theory. Þ dcosðyi À yjÞ À fidj l~ij 1⁄4 lij À lidj 1⁄4 ðxi À xjÞ sin yj À ðyi À yjÞcos yj (3)
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