UAV swarm communication and control architectures: a review

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have significantly disrupted the aviation industry. As technology and policy continue to develop, this disruption is only going to increase in magnitude. A specific technology poised to escalate this disruption is UAV swarm. UAV swarm has the potential to distribute tasks and coordinate operation of many UAVs with little to no operator intervention. This paper surveys literature regarding UAV swarm and proposes a swarm architecture that will allow for higher levels of swarm autonomy and reliability by utilizing cellular mobile wireless communication infrastructure. This paper chronicles initial testbed development to meet this proposed architecture. Focused development of UAV swarms with UAV-to-UAV communication autonomous coordination ability is central to advancing the utility of UAV swarms. The use of cellular mobile framework alleviates many limiting factors that hinder the utility of UAVs including range of communication, networking challenges, and size-weight-and-power considerations. In addition, cellular networks leverage a robust and reliable infrastructure for machine to machine communication proposed by 5G systems.