On the Robust Topology Recovery of UAV Swarm for Detection and Localization of Electronic Signals

Abstract

At present, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarm has been extensively applied in various fields. In the application of detection and localization of electronic signals, some UAVs could become disabled due to some abnormal events (e.g. electromagnetic interference and battery electricity exhaustion), and the topology connectivity of UAV swarm could be impaired, i.e., the topology of UAV swarm could be partitioned. For the topology recovery issue, we first propose Robust Topology Recovery Algorithm of UAV swarm (RTRA) to recover the topology connectivity of UAV swarm and enhance the topology robustness (reduce the number of potential topology recoveries in future) by relocating some UAVs to new positions with shortest flight distance. Furthermore, we note that the relocated UAVs are easy to exhaust the battery electricity and fail due to the extra flight movements for the topology recoveries, which affects the topology robustness. To this end, we present Cascading Robust Recovery Topology Algorithm of UAV swarm (CRTRA), which adopts a cascading movement strategy to share the flight movements among multiply relocated UAVs, thus avoiding the battery electricity exhaustion of the relocated UAVs. Extensive simulations and comparisons demonstrate that our proposed CRTRA can effectively recover the topology connectivity of UAV swarm while enhancing the topology robustness and shortening the flight distance of relocated UAVs, and CRTRA is especially suitable for some missions such as the detection and localization of electronic signals where UAVs are prone to fail.