Challenges in Sensing, Communication, Coordination

Group 1

What are the main challenges?

• moving decisions on board
• implicit communication/ without medium
• local communication
• how to control / monitor the distributed process "there is a human in the loop"

Group 3

What are the main challenges?

• limited payload
• processing power
• data fusion
• (self-)localization
• coordination, synchronization of sensing
• communication (range, loss)
• collision avoidance
  • should work in worst case scenario (multiple UAVs, obstacles, communication outage)
• robustness, handling of every possible situation
• must be fail-operational to maintain safe state (situation-dependent)
• optimizing the number of flying robots
• find simple rules to create desired emergent behavior

What are the best suitable sensors, communication modules for small-scale UAVs? What is available?

• sensors (should be light, low energy-consuming, low signal processing effort)
  • cameras
  • ultrasonic (for indoor, needs to be de-synchronized
  • infrared
  • contactsensors
  • LIDAR
  • IMU
  • GPS
  • wind sensor
  • barometric height sensor
  • sensing earth magnetic field
  • new integrated sensor modules (IMU, camera, processing unit)

• communication modules
  • radio, e.g., X-Bees
  • IR
  • remote control module (for legal reasons)

ability for multi-hop/mesh networks

Is a UAV swarm feasible? What are the limitations?

depends on scenario, loosly coordinated UAVs flying over a field is possible, cooperatively lifting payload is difficult

• cost
• coordination
• precision in localization
  • error progagation

How do we coordinate the UAVs to achieve team behavior?

• central coordination
  • simple UAVs
  • communication
  • complexity, scalability

• decentralized coordination
  • achieving optimal behavior
  • testing the system
  • designing the self-organizing algorithm
  • controllability

• mixture of both
  • high-level goal done by centralized planning
  • local control for collision avoidance, etc.