A novel resilient and reconfigurable swarm management scheme
Abstract As we witness the fast growth of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) field, new applications and services emerge at a rapid pace. Above all, the interest in groups of UAVs working together (swarms) is gaining momentum. This interest emerges since swarms are able to undertake more sophisticated tasks. Furthermore, they can also increase task performance and/or robustness. However, organizing a multi-UAV flight is not easy, involving challenges in terms of (i) swarm formation definition, (ii) takeoff procedure, (iii) in-flight coordination, (iv) communication between the swarm elements, (v) swarm layout reconfiguration, (vi) handling the loss of swarms elements, and (vii) controlled landing. These and other issues still hold back the mainstream adoption of swarms in sectors such as agriculture, border surveillance, and parcel delivery. In this work we provide solutions for two of the main critical challenges: (a) swarm layout reconfiguration, and (b) handling the loss of swarm elements. A wide set of experiments were made using our own realistic UAV emulation tool (ArduSim) in order to validate our proposals. The experiments show that the chances of facing collisions during the reconfiguration are greatly reduced even in error-prone scenarios, and that, in many cases, the loss of a UAV is handled seamlessly; otherwise (in the worst-case scenarios) a delay of just a few seconds is introduced. Additionally, this work addresses cases where, due to the lack of proper communication between the swarm elements, a swarm splits up. Experiments show that with our swarm resilience mechanisms those cases are inherently solved by creating autonomous sub-swarms which will then complete their part of the mission independently.