Autonomous position control of multi-unmanned aerial vehicle network designed for long range wireless data transmission

In recent decade, potential application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) has enabled replacement of various operations in hard-to-access areas, such as: inspection, surveillance or search and rescue application in challenging environments. One of the major challenge in this area is the limited range of wireless data transmission within legally allowable frequency and transmission power. This research presents the concept development of the multi-UAV system responsible for long range wireless transmission with heavy payload data by means of multi-UAV communication relay algorithm applied within Robot Operating System (ROS). The proposed system applies GPS based autonomous position control of drones, such as quadrotors, with mobile signal repeaters (MSRs) responsible for retransmitting data collected by the UAV operating with search and surveillance missions. The proposed system enables creation of autonomous network by utilizing swarm control of MSR positioning depending on the communication quality. The elaboration of the system incorporates the safety requirement of the UAV application. The system is intended to be modular, easy to customize and extendable for further development to establish more universal applications of UAV based systems in terms of aerial robotics. This article presents the proposed design concept as well as simulations tests.