Synchronous and Asynchronous Communication Effects on the Cooperative Control of Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles∗

Synchronous and asynchronous communication effects are considered in the cooperative control of uninhabited aerial vehicles where resource allocation is performed by an iterative network flow. We briefly outline both the single and iterative network flow assignment algorithms and their communication requirements. Then, using the abstracted communication framework found in the Air Force Research Laboratory MultiUAV simulator, a model is constructed to investigate the effects of fully synchronous or a limited form of asynchronous communication, in the form of message loss, on mission performance. These effects are observed in a sequence of vehicle-target scenarios where the task assignment is implemented as a redundant, centralized optimization.