Wireless Network Communications Architecture for Swarms of Small UAVs

Swarms of small, autonomous, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are true force multipliers, enabling soldiers in the field a birds-eye view of their environment, and providing a real-time early warning system for convoys, ground troops, and air assets. These next generation multi-vehicle UAV systems work as a collaborative autonomous unit, receiving only high-level mission commands, and require little human intervention for control. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) is involved in a multi-year R&D program to develop “strong autonomy” based on innovative scalable architectures for high-level autonomy and emergent group behavior in distributed vehicle systems that include both UAVs and small robots. JHU/APL has developed a reliable, robust communications architecture to manage the input and output of “belief” messages. This architecture comprises the content, structure, prioritization, broadcast scheduling, and reception of these messages. The architecture also includes the physical wireless link between vehicles, which for these proof-of-concept demonstrations is an ad hoc IEEE 802.11b wireless local area network (WLAN). The communications architecture supports three primary services: Periodic Packet Multicast service, On-Demand Packet Broadcast service, and Operation, Administration, and Management (OAM) service. The former two services are for transport of beliefs. The OAM service allows configuration of internal default parameters and allows access to its internal status and statistical counters. The architecture provides these services by supporting three interfaces: the Belief Transmit Service Interface (BTSI), Belief Receive Service Interface (BRSI), and OAM Interface (OAMI). Along with the architecture description, this paper presents actual field demonstration results of multiple ground and aerial vehicle systems.