Distributed Control for Groups of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Performing Surveillance Missions and Providing Relay Communication Network Services

This article presents the development of an autonomous and distributed movement coordination algorithm for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) swarms used in communication relay networks and in exploratory area surveillance missions. This work studies the performance of a hybrid algorithm combining pheromone maps, market auction paradigms and proactive link maintenance mechanisms to create a self-organizing flying network capable of providing network support for the UAV nodes already engaged in exploration and targeting tasks in the surveillance missions. In order to validate the proposal, simulations were performed assessing the desired performance aspects related to the target allocation and network connectivity. The acquired results provide evidence that the proposed solution is able to maintain the balance between the performance goals.