UAV Multilevel Swarms for Situation Management

Abstract

The development and usage of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) quickly increased in the last decades, mainly for military purposes. Nowadays, this type of technology is used in non-military contexts mainly for civil and environment protection: search & rescue teams, fire fighters, police officers, environmental scientific studies, etc. Although the technology for operating a single UAV is now mature, additional efforts are still necessary for using UAVs in fleets (or swarms). This position paper presents the ASIMUT project (Aid to SItuation Management based on MUltimodal, MUltiUAVs, MUltilevel acquisition Techniques). The challenges of this project consist of handling several fleets of UAVs (swarms) including communication, networking and positioning aspects. This motivates the development of novel multilevel cooperation algorithms which is an area that has not been widely explored, especially when autonomy is an additional challenge. Moreover, we will provide techniques to optimize communications for multilevel swarms. Finally, we will develop distributed and localized mobility management algorithms that will cope with conflicting objectives such as connectivity maintenance and geographical area coverage.