Path Planning of Multi-UAS Communication Relay by Decentralized MPC

When using Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASV) in marine operations, long distances and/or low power transmissions may severely limit the communication between the ASV and the ground station. One solution to overcome this obstacle is to use a group of small Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) to act as relay nodes, in order to provide a user-defined minimum communication capability. To achieve this, we propose a decentralized cooperative multi-agent system using fixed-wing UAS with nonlinear model predictive control, which aims to guarantee a desired signal strength between the ASV and the ground station. The novelty of the presented research resides in the inclusion of the aircraft performance model and the effects of wind, together with the inclusion of the directivity of the antennas. Experimental results of the proposed method are obtained through simulations.