Drone Swarm Coordination and Control Mechanisms

The rapidly evolving advanced projects agency (UAVs), whose unmanned aircraft vehicles are commonly known as drones, has now made it possible to deploy drone swarms—that is, a number of drones working together in order and coordination to achieve complex tasks on their own. This chapter investigates the underlying coordination strategies and control mechanisms that make it feasible for a swarm of drones to behave efficiently as an active entity. Such routinely seen scenes of birds in flocks and fish in schools are imitated by drone swarms; this is achieved through using distributed algorithms, consensus protocols, cooperative control strategies, and other means. The decentralized nature of these systems offers robustness, scalability, and adaptability—qualities that adapt well to their use in searching and rescuing survivors, surveying fields of crops, and defending territories against adversaries.