A Distributed Task Allocation Protocol for Cooperative Multi-UAV Search and Rescue Systems

Nowadays, applications involving multiple robotic systems connected through a wireless network - to perform tasks together - have an increased research interest. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are excellent tools for evaluating and surveying distributed robotic systems applications due to their flexibility and three-dimensional mobility capability. Cooperative systems composed of multiples UAVs may have a centralized coordination which assists the members of a team to make their decisions in a distributed manner regarding the tasks to be performed. This paper proposes a system composed of embedded hardware and a high-level communication protocol that serves as a basis for identifying, distributing, and allocating tasks in a simple and distributed way to be used by groups of UAVs. The proposal is evaluated in a search and rescue scenario. The setup is configured with two types of UAVs - namely, searchers (search for new tasks) and workers (execution of tasks). Also, a set of nine simulation experiments covering three different setups were performed. Then the proposal is evaluated by two sets of field experiments with real vehicles. The obtained results in the proposed experiments demonstrate that the system can be successfully used in the proposed scenario for task distribution and allocation.