Communication Aware UAV Swarm Surveillance Based on Hierarchical Architecture

Multi-agent unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) teaming becomes an essential part in science mission, modern warfare surveillance, and disaster rescuing. This paper proposes a decentralized UAV swarm persistent monitoring strategy in realizing continuous sensing coverage and network service. A two-layer (high altitude and low altitude) UAV teaming hierarchical structure is adopted in realizing the accurate object tracking in the area of interest (AOI). By introducing the UAV communication channel model in its path planning, both centralized and decentralized control schemes would be evaluated in the waypoint tracking simulation. The UAV swarm network service and object tracking are measured by metrics of communication link quality and waypoints tracking accuracy. UAV swarm network connectivity are evaluated over different aspects, such as stability and volatility. The comparison of proposed algorithms is presented with simulations. The result shows that the decentralized scheme outperforms the centralized scheme in the mission of persistent surveillance, especially on maintaining the stability of inner UAV swarm network while tracking moving objects.