An Autonomous Airship Swarm for Maritime Patrol

Abstract

The studies of swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been increasing, and swarm of UAVs can become part of many daily tasks. But, as matter of fact, even the use of a UAV does not mean the decreasing of operational complexities and, consequently, the costs of performing its tasks, because of high costs of trained operators and remote control facilities to operate state-of-the-art UAVs. So, in order to support the operation of swarm, this work proposes a parallel/distributed framework to control mission of each UAV. These unmanned crafts will less dependent on remote control facilities. Embedding the mission control running in an embedded parallel/distributed computer system will be able to carry on basic mission control tasks. In order to prove this concept, the following items were developed: (i) a prototype of an embedded parallel/distributed computer cluster using low-cost components; (ii) new procedures to resolve navigation and collision evasion issues; and (iii) a parallel/distributed path discover program. The tests carried out in the embedded parallel/distributed computer cluster prototype and with new evasion procedures proved the viability of proposed framework.