Swarm Intelligence-Inspired Autonomous Flocking Control in UAV Networks

The collaboration of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has stimulated the emergence of a novel wireless network paradigm named UAV network. UAV network, compared with uncoordinated UAV systems could provide wider coverage, better monitoring, and understanding of the interested area, and smarter decision-making. However, realizing the full potential of UAV network in dynamic environments poses great challenges in topology/flocking control, energy conservation, and quality of service guarantee. In this backdrop, this paper proposes a swarm intelligence-inspired autonomous flocking control scheme for UAV networks. First, based on the concept of intelligent emergence of swarm agents, a swarm intelligence-inspired multi-layer flocking control scheme is built for the flocking control problem. Second, an integrated sensing and communication method is put forward to regulate how a UAV can calculate its distances to its neighbors and its deflection angle. Finally, a series of experiments are conducted on our simulator developed on OMNeT++ and the flocking prototype to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. The simulation and experimental results have shown that the proposed scheme could realize efficient flocking control with low energy consumption and satisfied the quality of service.