A low-computation distributed connectivity control for coordinated multi-UAS

Multi-UAS (MAS) flocking requires multiple controllers with connected communication topologies. Real-time deployment of multi-agents is commonly associated with dynamic communication topologies, which has been considered as a challenging topic. This paper proposes a novel low-computation distributed connectivity control method to generate connected communication topologies and maintain the connectivity for coordinated multi-UAS. Considering the realtime communication imperfections, the communication links among multi-UAS have been priced. In addition, a multi-UAS communication price matrix has been generated. The proposed method cannot only maintain the connectivity of multi-UAS and also minimize the communication price in a distributed manner. Furthermore,the proposed method is also very flexible and can be applied to multi-UAS with varying number of agents. Both the numerical simulation and experiment results results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed low computation distributed connectivity control. It is very promising for a wide range of applications where multi-UAS will greatly aid missions such as those expected to be performed by team of cooperative UAS, e.g. search and rescue, surveillance, vehicle tracking, and MAS-based load delivery.