An Adaptive Multi-clustered Scheme for Autonomous UAV Swarms

Swarm technology for autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has gained popularity in the last few years due to their potential for civilian and military applications. Intelligent swarm systems are very efficient at solving group-level problems and their capability to accomplish complex missions with no or little human intervention. One of the most challenging problems is operating in environments with surrounding obstacles such as buildings, thus, often obstructing inter-UAV communication. A UAV swarm is required to maintain continuous communication between its members and preserve the stability of its formation while flying towards an ultimate goal. In this paper we propose MSCS, a new cooperative and adaptive scheme for multi-clustered autonomous UAV swarms. This schemes allows several UAVs operating in a swarm formation to coordinate their navigation and path planning operations by using an adaptive multi-clustered leader-follower approach. The swarm members follow a dynamically elected leader based on the UAV with best fit to lead the swarm towards the destination. The coordination of the UAVs is achieved through SBP (Swarm Broadcast Protocol), a single-hop broadcast UAV-to-UAV (U2U) communication protocol, which allows swarm members to exchange information about their current location and their local cluster leader. We present a set of performance results, which show that this scheme contributes efficiently at maintaining the swarm formation's stability at acceptable density and disconnection ratio.