Energy management in swarm of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Automated maintenance has become a necessity for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) systems to function in remote environments for an extended period of time with a higher number of vehicles. Once removed from the energy management loop, the human operator is free to concentrate on higher level task management and data analysis. This paper firstly describes the design, test and construction of an autonomous Ground Recharge Stations (GRS) for battery-powered quadrotor helicopter. In order to incorporate the charging of the quadrotors in the overall swarm behaviour, the focus of the research presented here has been to reduce the charging phase of a single vehicle by developing safer electrical contacts and using a balancer in the charging process. The amount of extra current available from the new design easily pushed the flying-time/charging-time ratio of the quadrotors over 1. Then the paper describes a novel approach for the integration of this technology into an energy efficient multi-agent system. The development of a prioritisation function and queuing protocols between the UAVs and GRSs guarantee an optimised solution to the assignment problem dependent on the mission profile. Results show that the system's energy management remains efficient regardless of number and position of the platforms, or nature of the environment.