Cooperative Electronic Chaining Using Small Unmanned Aircraft

When using a team of small unmanned aircraft, with no satellite communications, the operational range of the team is typically limited by line-of-sight communication constraints between an individual aircraft and a ground station, and not the endurance range of the individual aircraft within the team. By using electronic chaining to form a multi-hop communication link using the team, the overall communication range from an individual vehicle to a ground station can be increased to where the operational range of the team is only limited by the endurance range of an individual aircraft. In addition, using mobile repeaters that are driven by electronic constraints and communication performance objectives support a much greater operational deployment area and environment than would possible using geographic (range) based constraints alone. This paper presents recent developments in electronic chaining using extremum seeking methods and presents application results using the Ares unmanned aircraft system and the AUGNet 802.11 communications network test bed developed in the Research & Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles (RECUV) at the University of Colorado, Boulder. While it was hoped that actual flight data results would have been available for publication, no recent flights have been be conducted due to FAA restrictions on unmanned aircraft operations.