UAV Swarms: Decision‐Making Paradigms

Abstract

The operation of UAV swarms has attracted great attention as their coordination and cooperation could bring significant impact in both military and civilian applications. Despite this potential, there are key challenges to be addressed to enable UAV swarm operations. Unlike operations of a small number of aerial vehicles, the onboard decision‐making responsibility may be more favorably distributed across the UAV swarm taking into account their scalability and sustainability. This chapter addresses three main issues of UAV technologies enabling onboard decision‐making: task allocation, communication network connectivity, and guidance and control in UAV swarm operations. Moreover, state‐of‐the‐art propositions to solve these issues and their limitations are discussed. This chapter also emphasizes the need for a new decision‐making paradigm for more efficient and effective UAV swarm operations and shows its future direction.