Cooperative Target Localization with a Communication-Aware Unmanned Aircraft System

This paper presents an approach to generating information-gathering trajectories for a cooperative unmanned aircraft system that takes into account the reliability of multihop networked communication. The algorithms presented here implicitly consider the communication limitations of the aircraft within a path-planning algorithm in which there is a position dependency on both the sensing and communication capabilities of the network. A communication-aware performance metric is derived by combining the extended information filter with a packet-erasure channel model and stochastic model of packet routing. Informative trajectories that maximize this metric are generated by a distributed, hierarchical planning algorithm. Flight results are used to characterize the communication channel model for use in a multivehicle simulation. Finally, simulation studies are used to evaluate the path-planning approach through the specific application of stationary WiFi source localization. These studies show that the approach leads to improved estimation performance relative to path-planning that does not consider communication reliability. Further, the approach leads to the emergence of natural roles whereby some of the aircraft contribute largely to the sensing portion of the objective, while others improve communication reliability by serving mainly as communication relays.