Coordinated multi-UAV exploration strategy for large areas with communication constrains

Abstract

In missions that require robotic vehicles operating with a high level of autonomy, the coordination and the tasks assigned for each vehicle play a crucial role. In this work, we present a coordination control strategy applied in a searching scenario of oceanographic research buoys taking into account the problem of communication constraints. The proposed control strategy include the assignment of two different teams of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that search and acquire data from buoys with unknown locations in complex coastal or remote oceanic regions. We present a 3-layer architecture that search for the buoys, enables communication with them, and creates a UAV communication network with a quality-of-service scheme to recover the data. Extensive simulations illustrate the performance of the proposed coordinated control strategy.