Design and evaluation of UAV swarm command and control strategies

We present an approach to developing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarming behaviors and command and control (C2) strategies to govern them. In recent years, the military has become increasingly interested in the development and applications of UAVs. Recent attention has shifted toward designing UAVs which are not only unmanned, but also autonomous or self-controlled. One possible method is to utilize a large number of small, autonomous UAVs which form a cohesive group or “swarm” to accomplish complex missions as a whole. Swarms offer numerous benefits over single UAVs which include higher coverage, redundancy in numbers and reduced long-range bandwidth requirements. A major challenge to engineering a swarm is not only designing the swarming behavior, but finding an effective way to control the behavior so that the swarm can be directed to complete the desired mission. In this paper, we used the agent-based modeling toolkit NetLogo to create two different mission types. We then created UAV swarming behaviors and ways in which those behaviors can be altered to accomplish each mission. Despite the fact that these models are still preliminary, and lacking in full realism, this work has demonstrated the potential usefulness of agent-based modeling in the engineering of UAV swarms.