Guaranteeing Partial State Synchronization for UAV Platoon Under Message or UAV Loss

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly being used to perform tasks either individually, or in groups. As more and more applications of UAV platoons are emerging, it is becoming apparent that coordination based on dynamically sensed information is critical for mission success. In this paper, we have addressed the concerns of fallible communication and an unreliable system on UAV platoon coordination. We have studied how robustness may be designed in a multi-agent scenario with arbitrary number of agents and developed an algorithm which guarantees distributed partial state synchronization with bounded variance in number of states despite facing message loss or system failure in agents. Our algorithm allows agents to autonomously take corrective actions in order to ensure the system remains stable. Results show that our algorithm is efficient, scalable and highly capable of achieving these goals.