ICCSwarm
Jonathan Diller, Peter Hall, Corey Schanker, Kristen Ung, Philip Belous, Peter Russell, Qi Han
Abstract
Swarms of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have many applications including search and rescue, disaster response, surveillance, infrastructure inspection, among many others. A key aspect of UAV swarms is keeping the UAVs connected through wireless communication and any deployment of UAV swarms must consider communication constraints during motion planning. In this paper we introduce \textit{ICCSwarm}, a framework for integrating communication and control in UAV swarms. \textit{ICCSwarm} consists of two phases, a planning phase where combined communication and motion planning are validated in simulation, and a deployment phase, where a UAV architecture designed around integrated communication and control executes missions from the planning phase on physical UAVs. We implemented \textit{ICCSwarm} on a physical UAV testbed and evaluated its effectiveness through a unique case study in partnership with NASA's JPL. We deployed the UAVs to trial small satellite orbits for data collection on asteroids and the results validate our design and highlight \textit{ICCSwarm}'s capabilities.