Deep Neural Network-Based Aerial Transport in the Presence of Cooperative and Uncooperative UAS

TL;DR

This paper introduces a resilient deep neural network framework for decentralized aerial transport using UAS, capable of handling both cooperative and uncooperative agents while ensuring stability, convergence, and coverage in complex scenarios.

Contribution

The work presents a novel DNN-based multi-agent transport architecture with dynamic pruning and hierarchical coordination, enhancing robustness against uncooperative agents and improving scalability.

Findings

Rapid convergence to target zones under full cooperation.

High resilience with performance degradation localized near disruptions.

Effective handling of uncooperative agents maintaining system stability.

Abstract

We present a resilient deep neural network (DNN) framework for decentralized transport and coverage using uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) operating in $\mathbb{R}^n$. The proposed DNN-based mass-transport architecture constructs a layered inter-UAS communication graph from an initial formation, assigns time-varying communication weights through a forward scheduling mechanism that guides the team from the initial to the final configuration, and ensures stability and convergence of the resulting multi-agent transport dynamics. The framework is explicitly designed to remain robust in the presence of uncooperative agents that deviate from or refuse to follow the prescribed protocol. Our method preserves a fixed feed-forward topology but dynamically prunes edges to uncooperative agents, maintains convex, feedforward mentoring among cooperative agents, and computes global desired set points through a sparse linear relation consistent with leader references. The target set is abstracted by $N$ points that become final desired positions, enabling coverage-optimal transport while keeping computation low and guarantees intact. Extensive simulations demonstrate that, under full cooperation, all agents converge rapidly to the target zone with a 10\% boundary margin and under partial cooperation with uncooperative agents, the system maintains high convergence among cooperative agents with performance degradation localized near the disruptions, evidencing graceful resilience and scalability. These results confirm that forward-weight scheduling, hierarchical mentor--mentee coordination, and on-the-fly DNN restructuring yield robust, provably stable UAS transport in realistic fault scenarios.