Abstract
This paper presents a communication network for a squadron of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to be used in the scanning rocket impact area for Barreira do Inferno Launch Center—CLBI (Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil), aiming at detecting intruder boats. The main features of communication networks associated with multi-UAV systems are presented. This system sends information through Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). After comparing and analyzing area scanning strategies, it presents the specification of a data communication network architecture for a squadron of UAVs within a sensor network using XBee Pro 900HP S3B modules. A brief description is made about the initial information from the construction of the system. The embedded hardware and the design procedure of a dedicated communication antenna to the XBee modules are presented. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed architecture in terms of robustness and reliability, a set of experimental tests in different communication scenarios is carried out. Network management software is employed to measure the throughput, packet loss and other performance indicators in the communication links between the different network nodes. Experimental results allow verifying the quality and performance of the network nodes, as well as the reliability of the communication links, assessing signal received quality, range and latency.
Highlights
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used in a large number of applications over the last years in many different fields, for example, environmental monitoring [1,2,3], visual coverage [4,5,6], natural disaster management [7,8,9,10], among others.When scanning large areas, a multi-unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) system can execute a monitoring task more efficiently and faster than a single aircraft, with the possibility to acquire images simultaneously and from different points of view
This section aims to define a position to place the XBee module in the UAV so that the antenna lobe has minimal deformation caused by the aircraft structure as stated in Reference [52] where it is effectively shown that the aircraft structure can cause normal log shading. This effect can be harmful to communication and has been minimized by using 4nec2 software [53] to determine the location of the XBee module antenna in the UAV
The XBee device was attached to the aircraft structure
Summary
A multi-UAV system can execute a monitoring task more efficiently and faster than a single aircraft, with the possibility to acquire images simultaneously and from different points of view. A team of UAVs working according to an adequate collaboration strategy can overcome typical limitations in terms of autonomy and short-range associated with a single UAV, covering larger areas and ensuring the fast execution of the mission, while aggregating cost reduction, fault tolerance and scalability to the task [11]. Many issues should be addressed before its effective use in order to provide efficient communication among the UAVs. Differently from common ad hoc networks, flying ad hoc networks (FANETs) must deal with several hard constraints depending on the application, including high mobility and varying speeds of the UAVs, intermittency of communication links and dynamic changes in topology [12]. The network must reorganize itself often and, sometimes, it may even get partitioned
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