SOSUAS: Stability Optimized Swarming for Unmanned Aerial Systems

Unmanned aerial systems (UASs) have unprecedented potential in various fields, from surveillance to packet delivery. The swarms formed by multiple UAS increase the number of potential UAS applications as they can be utilized for complicated tasks. Therefore, various swarming methodologies are proposed to coordinate the UAS positions in swarms. Virtual forces and molecular geometry based approaches have been instrumental in UAS swarming applications. These approaches apply forces between UAS nodes similar to electron pairs for near-ideal volume coverage. However, the ratio of these forces and the stability of the node positions in the network have been vexing challenges. In this paper, we propose an approach to optimize the virtual forces for a stable 3D swarming behavior in a realistic communications environment. The results of extensive simulations show that the approach can identify the relationship among the attractive and repulsive virtual forces for given positional properties of a UAS swarm.