From random process to chaotic behavior in swarms of UAVs

Martin Rosalie (1, 2) , Grégoire Danoy (3) , Serge Chaumette (2) , Pascal Bouvry (3)

1 SnT - Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust [Luxembourg]
2 LaBRI - Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique
3 CSC - Computer Science and Communications Research Unit [Luxembourg]

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) applications have seen an important increase in the last decade for both military and civilian applications ranging from fire and high seas rescue to military surveillance and target detection. While this technology is now mature for a single UAV, new methods are needed to operate UAVs in swarms, also referred to as fleets. This work focuses on the mobility management of one single autonomous swarm of UAVs which mission is to cover a given area in order to collect information. Several constraints are applied to the swarm to solve this problem due to the military context. First, the UAVs mobility must be as unpredictable as possible to prevent any UAV tracking. However the Ground Control Station (GCS) operator(s) still needs to be able to forecast the UAVs paths. Finally, the UAVs are autonomous in order to guarantee the mission continuity in a hostile environment and the method must be distributed to ensure fault-tolerance of the system. To solve this problem, we introduce the Chaotic Ant Colony Optimization to Coverage (CACOC) algorithm that combines an Ant Colony Optimization approach (ACO) with a chaotic dynamical system. CACOC permits to obtain a deterministic but unpredictable system. Its performance is compared to other state-of-the art models from the literature using several coverage-related metrics, i.e. coverage rate, recent coverage and fairness. Numerical results obtained by simulation underline the performance of our CACOC method: a deterministic method with unpredictable le UAV trajectories that still ensures a high area coverage.

Mots clés: cooperative UAVs; multilevel swarms; mobility models; ACO; chaotic systems

Domaines: Dynamique Chaotique [nlin.CD]; Systèmes dynamiques [math.DS]

Martin Rosalie, Grégoire Danoy, Serge Chaumette, Pascal Bouvry. From random process to chaotic behavior in swarms of UAVs. 6th ACM Symposium on Development and Analysis of Intelligent Vehicular Networks and Applications, Nov 2016, Malte, Malta. pp.9 - 15, ⟨10.1145/2989275.2989281⟩. ⟨hal-01360176⟩