Principles and Cooperative Techniques for Multi-drone Systems and Swarms

Multi-drone systems and swarms represent a powerful and evolving technology both in the civil and in the military field. The proposed lecture first addresses application advantages and taxonomies of multi-drone systems, focusing on the concepts of UAS swarming, manned/unmanned teaming, and M-to-N control. Different mission architectures are described which foresee various levels of in-flight coordination.

In the second part of the lecture, recent approaches for cooperative path planning, guidance, and navigation are covered. Also taking advantage from simulation and flight data gathered in recent research projects, system requirements and potential are discussed in details with emphasis on GNSS-challenging environments.