Decentralized control of unmanned aerial robots for wireless airborne communication networks

Abstract

This paper presents a cooperative control strategy for a team of aerial robotic vehicles to establish wireless airborne communication networks between distributed heterogeneous vehicles. Each aerial robot serves as a flying mobile sensor performing a reconfigurable communication relay node which enables communication networks with static or slow-moving nodes on ground or ocean. For distributed optimal deployment of the aerial vehicles for communication networks, an adaptive hill-climbing type decentralized control algorithm is developed to seek out local extremum for optimal localization of the vehicles. The sensor networks established by the decentralized cooperative control approach can adopt its configuration in response to signal strength as the function of the relative distance between the autonomous aerial robots and distributed sensor nodes in the sensed environment. Simulation studies are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed decentralized cooperative control technique for robust communication networks.