Towards a fully autonomous swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles

With advances in UAS technologies the quadrotor was given a special interest for its manoeuvrability and payload capacity. These assets are amplified when more of them are deployed simultaneously in order to improve the situational awareness over areas of interest. As the number of agents operating in the same environment grows, a common intelligence is needed to optimize their cooperation and ensure their safety throughout the completion of the missions. This paper presents the results of experiments conducted to demonstrate a set of algorithms on a surveillance system employing a swarm of quadrotor UAVs to track detected targets. It was initially assumed that the UAV paths are generated at constant altitude to replace the complicated quadrotor dynamics by ones of a point mass entity. The system is then extended to the third dimension to allow for a more complex guidance and navigation scheme. Several simulations were performed under various circumstances to validate the accuracy and robustness of the system.