Brief Paper - Distributed cooperative control for deployment and task allocation of unmanned aerial vehicle networks

摘要

In this study, the authors consider the deployment of unmanned aerial vehicle networks for task accomplishment within a closed region. Each agent with limited sensing range and communication range needs to take charge of the task accomplishment within a part of the whole region. The main objective is to optimise the deployment of the agents such that the maximum travelling time the agents take to reach a place within the surveillance region is minimised. The deployment issue is formulated as the worst-case disc-covering problem and a distributed cooperative control strategy is designed for agents with limited mobility. It is proven that by the proposed control strategy the network configuration converges to a local optimum configuration. Moreover, a combined optimisation approach is developed to improve the performance by optimising the initial configuration. To guarantee the proper working of the designed control strategy and K-connectivity of the network, a distributed topology control scheme is proposed. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy is testified by simulation.