Communication‐Aware Information‐Gathering Experiments with an Unmanned Aircraft System

Abstract

This paper presents single and multiaircraft flight experiments to assess an information‐theoretic path planning algorithm that incorporates sensing and communication to guide an unmanned aircraft. The communication is modeled with packet erasure channels for each link in a multihop mesh network. The planning objective is to maximize the mutual information between the target state and measurements received at a single base station from all aircraft. A novel unmanned aircraft system was developed to facilitate experiments with multiple unmanned aircraft utilizing multihop mesh networking. The value of communication‐aware planning was assessed through flight experiments with a single aircraft localizing a radio emitter. Additional experiments with two aircraft demonstrated and assessed the performance of the approach, showing that the improvement in sensing can be appreciable when utilizing multihop communication.

EPOC: Efficient Perception via Optimal Communication

“…Prior work on active perception has primarily focused on one agent controlling its sensors (Butko and Movellan 2009) or selecting a subset of sensors (Li et al 2016;Satsangi et al 2018). Research has been reported on controlling multiple sensors in which, whom to communicate with is either predefined (Zivan et al 2015;Kapourchali and Banerjee 2019) or decided by a fusion center (Stachura and Frew 2017). In other areas, such as distributed AI and multiagent systems, some recent works (Hoshen 2017) have investigated the importance of learning with whom to communicate where the goal is coordination between agents.…”

Aerodynamic modeling of the Skywalker X8 Fixed-Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

“…Some examples of its use is autonomous net landing [20], design of a model based longitudinal controller based on system identification [21] , platform for different camerabased experiments [22]- [26]. Reference [27] use the X8 in experiments with vision based roll angle determination, [28] installed fuel cells, while [29] use it in experiments on communication-aware path planning.…”