Control and communication in a system with multiple interconnected aerial drones

• Autor(a) principal: Rodrigues, André Filipe Nascimento
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/29452
• topic: Routing; UAVs; GPSR; FANET; WMN; Ad Hoc; Position Prediction; RSSI

Flying ad-hoc networks (FANETs) that are comprised of swarms of drones have become an important field of research in the area of Information Technologies (IT). With the increase of areas where these small UAVs fit, complex mission planners are being developed in order to autonomously manage and control multiple drones that belong to distinct missions. To be able to guarantee the communication between drones, a Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) with the ability to adapt to the FANETs unstable topology changes is necessary, ensuring communications within the mesh without the aid of an external, stationary base station. The purpose of this Dissertation is to design, implement and test a routing platform capable of interconnecting all drones present on a FANET. To do that, the Dissertation has four main goals: (1) the analysis of different routing algorithms that fit Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) methodologies; (2) the theoretical study, implementation and simulation tests of an improved version of the chosen routing algorithm to fit FANET environments; (3) the design, implementation and testing of a routing platform capable of managing drone-to-drone communications were routes are decided by the developed routing algorithm, while also dealing with communication handover; and finally, (4) the integration and testing of the routing platform with an existing autonomous mission planner which assembles missions and autonomously controls drones’ actions. By predicting the future positions of the drones in the network, and foretelling which neighbors are the best next-hop candidates for specific destinations, we show substantial improvements in network performance over the base version of the chosen routing algorithm. The enhanced routing protocol improves the selection of the next-hop node in the highly-mobile and noisy FANET environments, and a thorough set of simulations shows improvements in packet loss by 33%, in routing overhead by 13% and in jitter by 46%. This enhanced version is also integrated with a mission planner that controls drones autonomously on predefined missions, which performance is evaluated in real-life scenarios, which are successfully validated.