Mission Oriented Miniature Fixed-wing UAV Swarms: A Multi-layered and Distributed Architecture

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multi-layered, fully distributed architecture for miniature fixed-wing UAV swarms, enhancing scalability and versatility, and demonstrates its effectiveness through field experiments with 21 UAVs performing complex missions.

Contribution

It presents the first integrated architecture enabling formation flight, target recognition, and tracking in fixed-wing UAV swarms, supporting large-scale and diversified missions.

Findings

Successful demonstration of formation flight with 21 UAVs

Effective target recognition and tracking in field experiments

Architecture supports scalable and versatile UAV swarm operations

Abstract

UAV swarms have triggered wide concern due to their potential application values in recent years. While there are studies proposed in terms of the architecture design for UAV swarms, two main challenges still exist: (1) Scalability, supporting a large scale of vehicles; (2) Versatility, integrating diversified missions. To this end, a multi-layered and distributed architecture for mission oriented miniature fixed-wing UAV swarms is presented in this paper. The proposed architecture is built on the concept of modularity. It divides the overall system to five layers: low-level control, high-level control, coordination, communication and human interaction layers, and many modules that can be viewed as black boxes with interfaces of inputs and outputs. In this way, not only the complexity of developing a large system can be reduced, but also the versatility of supporting diversified missions can be ensured. Furthermore, the proposed architecture is fully distributed that each UAV performs the decision-making procedure autonomously so as to achieve better scalability. Moreover, different kinds of aerial platforms can be feasibly extended by using the control allocation matrices and the integrated hardware box. A prototype swarm system based on the proposed architecture is built and the proposed architecture is evaluated through field experiments with a scale of 21 fixed-wing UAVs. Particularly, to the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first work which successfully demonstrates formation flight, target recognition and tracking missions within an integrated architecture for fixed-wing UAV swarms through field experiments.