Drone Swarm As Network Control Systems

Project Title

Drone Swarm As Network Control Systems

Project Area of Specialization RoboticsProject Summary

An aircraft flying without a human pilot or passengers is commonly known as a drone. These types of aircrafts were called drones in the early days when they were used for target practice for the Naval ships and Airforce. A single drone is a part of a UAV(Unmanned aerial vehicle) system which consists of a ground or aerial control and communication system. The flight of a UAV is controlled by this station via radio communication, so it becomes an RPA(Remotely piloted aircraft). Or if the system is autonomous then with the help of autopilot human intervention is removed. As we know that technology mostly evolved from the military research and demands to meet modern warfare. UAV technology started progressing through the twentieth century by the military to perform operations too dangerous to involve human lives. Later their use expanded to many non-military applications like:

• Aerial photography.

• Delivery services.

• Agriculture.

• Surveillance.

Drone swarming is an approach to the coordination of multiple UAV’s( Unmanned Aerial Vehicle). It is a system which consists of a swarm of drones and a control station. This control station can either be positioned at a ground facility or could be an airborne mothership. In a swarm one drone is assigned master role and the other drones in the swarm act as slave drones. The master drone is then instructed by the GCS (ground control station) which interprets the commands and give guidance to the slave drones in the swarm. Drones although very versatile in a lot of scenarios have several limitations forcing them not to work on their fullest potential e.g.

• Less field of view

• Limited range

• Taking more time to perform a single task 

• Payload capacity

Our approach to make the use of drones more practical in the field is to develop a swarm of drones enclosed in a network control system. This removes a lot of limitations as mentioned above.

Project Objectives

Initially used and developed in the military field which underwent many advances and now are also being used in the civilian field. Being used for firefighting, rescue as well as more specific operations such as surveillance and attack. This is because they are highly versatile and have a very low cost and are easy to deploy.

In military deployments, drones are essential to save human pilots life from injury or death. Since flying a multimillion-dollar aircraft is very complex but also very risky since there is no space for error; a disaster is waiting to happen. Even with the perfect flying skills a machine can fail at any given time resulting in loss of life. Greater efficiency can be achieved by putting multiple drones together in a swarm to achieve maximum potential of the applications provided by these types of aircraft.

A swarm usually follows a formation flight because better positioning allows good distribution of the task and makes the drones more efficient. This will then raise the question about the coordination and communication strategy and the type of fleet control strategy being implemented in the swarm i.e., Leader- follower, Virtual leader, Behavioral approach etc. These strategies will be discussed in further sections. The formation flying of drones has become typical due to the importance of a coordinated group in achieving a common task. The performance of a formation flight outdoes the high performance of a single large aircraft.

A drone swarm resolves the problem of payload limitation, improving on reducing the cost and increasing the reliability. It increases the probability of success of the mission. Moreover, if one drone has a malfunction, then the others can continue the task. Proper coordination and cooperation between the drones ensure the exchange of information and the achievement of the task. 

The cooperative system being used in the field must ensure its reliability to prevent any disastrous event. It is important to detect behaviors that might contribute to the collisions thus putting the operation in jeopardy. To put effective countermeasures against this problem a combination of sensors and algorithms are put into effect to safeguard the swarm integrity and to ensure the mission safety.

Project Implementation Method

We propose a method to ensure a reliable communication between the drones and the ground station by emphasizing on the smooth communication flow. A network control system is designed to achieve this task. This control system encapsulates the swarm and the GCS (ground control station) in a single network for the maximum information sharing. An AD Hoc Network approach is used in which the master drone becomes the gateway for the information flow in a manner that the master drone takes the information from GCS and relays it to the slave drones in the swarm. To accomplish this task master drone is given two radio transmissions.

The control of the overall system is done enclosed within a wireless communication network. Low-cost UAV Swarm Technology project can mitigate such limitations. Several drones could collaborate with each other in a drone swarm to perform tasks more efficiently while providing coverage for large geographic areas. The master drone will take instructions from ground control and pass the instructions to the swarm through a communication module. Slave drones will take the instructions and perform accordingly and send information back to the master drone. To control the drones, two sorts of communication channel can be used:

• simplex channel

• duplex channel

The simplex channel is used when there is no need of getting additional data except e.g., the visual contact. On the contrary, the duplex channel is used where the transmission of additional data is required on both ends. This additional data could refer to the telemetry, or other information about the flight. We consider the duplex channel since the information sent between the vehicles does not insist only on the visual concept, but telemetry, GPS information, predetermined map of the environment in addition to the exterior factors are considered before the swarm starts the mission.

Flocking Behavior:

Flocking is a form of collective Behavior of large number of interacting agents with a common group of objectives. Flocking refers to a certain formation of agents. Flocking behavior is adopted by the animals that move with a certain formation/group where one leads the flock. Flocking behavior is adapted or inspired by animals such as birds, sheep, fish, penguins, and crowd. Similarly, the UAV swarm follows a flocking behavior in which master drone is leading the slave drones.

Benefits of the Project

The main goal of the UAVs is to fulfill a mission that could be military, scientific, economic, or even commercial in nature. The interest in the control and navigation of drones is due to their use in hazardous environments.

The real appearance of military drones does not come into place until the wars of Korea and Vietnam where they were used for stealth surveillance. In the 90’s, the doctrine of ‘zero death’ had emerged allowing for the development of army drones and for their use in every army conflict from the 2000s. The prosperity of these war machines is due to the miniaturization of the avionics vehicles’ size in addition to their long-distance communication. It ought to be noted that 12 states officially possess military drones: the United States, Israel, the United Kingdom, Russia, Iran, Turkey, France, Germany, Italy, India, China, and Pakistan.

It is appropriate to enumerate some military applications in which we can refer to the use of the UAV swarm:

a) Military applications (Navy, Army and Air Force)

• Electronic intelligence

• Reconnaissance

• Radar system jamming and destruction

• Relaying radio signals

• Shadowing enemy fleets

• Surveillance of enemy activity

• Target designation and monitoring

• Elimination of unexploded bombs

• Decoying missiles by the emission of artificial signatures

b) Civil applications

• Aerial topography for geographical research

• Agriculture spraying and monitoring

• Search and rescue

• Meteorological Measurements

• Firefighting and forestry fire detection

• Surveillance for illegal imports

• Pollution Studies and land monitoring

• Pipelines and Power line inspection

• Oil and gas search

• Delivery of parcels

• Urban planning

• Detection of mobile vehicles on the ground

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

Drone swarms and NCSs are attracting great attention. Developing drone swarms as NCS is anticipated to assist in improving their performance when facing operational and environmental challenges. Hence,  a better understanding of the operation of drone swarms as NCSs is given. We started working on the topologies and technologies needed to implement two types of deployment strategies and the networking and computational systems, and a thorough analysis of how to integrate them to achieve a self-organized swarm system. We end up showing that building a networking system that does not rely on identifying hosts (e.g., drones) but rather computational functions, which can be deployed in any drone, provides the baseline to tackle the major challenges identified for the development of drone swarms as networked control systems.

Relying on a networking system able to resolve on-demand computation expressions composed from named data and functions in a transparent fashion to each drone, contributes to the self-organization properties of a swarm.

As each drone operates under fluctuating wireless, networking, and environment constraints it might result in loss of communication with or within the swarm. It is not realistic to give control of each drone in a swarm to a human pilot to fly in a formation. Hence, the coordination flying of the swarm in a formation should be automated. Although autonomous navigation of the fleet has its own set of challenges, lot of research has been put in this field to make it a practical method. The communication between the drones is being achieved by a wireless medium in a way that they should be sending data in a synchronized way. Sharing information in the swarm in synchronized manner is very crucial because unsynchronized information may lead to an incorrect decision which might lead to a critical failure. In this project the ultimate objective is to ensure a reliable communication between the swarm and with the GCS. Also developing a system of drone swarm to practically overcome the limitations of a single drone.

Final Deliverable of the Project HW/SW integrated systemCore Industry OthersOther Industries Agriculture , Food , Media , Security , Telecommunication Core Technology RoboticsOther Technologies Artificial Intelligence(AI), Clean TechSustainable Development Goals Good Health and Well-Being for People, Industry, Innovation and InfrastructureRequired Resources

Item Name	Type	No. of Units	Per Unit Cost (in Rs)	Total (in Rs)
			Total in (Rs)	79800
Airframe	Equipment	2	3000	6000
On board batteris	Equipment	2	4000	8000
Electronic speed controller	Equipment	2	1500	3000
Power distribution board	Equipment	2	700	1400
carbon fiber tubes	Equipment	4	1000	4000
Pixhawk Flight controller	Equipment	1	20000	20000
brushless motors	Equipment	8	2000	16000
wires, bolts, nuts, propellers	Equipment	14	500	7000
APMN-Q551 5GHz wifi module	Equipment	2	2200	4400
Thesis write up, proposals, spec sheets, markers, printing, binding	Miscellaneous	1	10000	10000