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An UAV swarm coordination protocol supporting planned missions

Abstract:

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are being widely used as a valuable tool in critical situations, especially when the access to the target area is difficult or hazardous. In these situations, a swarm of UAVs can provide additional benefits by covering larger areas, thereby speeding up the fulfillment of a mission, or by carrying heavier loads that a single UAV would not support. In this paper we present MUSCOP, a protocol that allows a set of UAVs to properly synchronize their flight in the fulfillment of planned missions. The results obtained show that MUSCOP achieves a high degree of swarm cohesion even in the presence of channel losses, introducing minimum synchronization delays and low position offset errors compared to an ideal scenario.