VShreyas Devaraju received his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from San Diego State University (SDSU), San Diego, USA in 2017. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Computational Science jointly at SDSU and University of California, Irvine. His research interests include cross-layer routing and MAC protocols for wireless networks, UAV swarm mobility and communication networks.
Research Advisor(s)
Sunil Kumar and Alexander Ihler
Research Abstract
In recent years, there has been a surge in the use of inexpensive micro UAV swarms for civilian and military applications such as search and rescue, surveillance and tracking, and as loitering ammunitions. To carry out these applications efficiently, there is a need to develop scalable, decentralized autonomous UAV swarm architectures with high network connectivity. In our work, a connectivity-oriented pheromone-based mobility model is designed for search and rescue operations, which is capable of maintaining connectivity among nodes in the UAV swarm. We use stigmergy-based digital pheromone maps along with distance-based local connectivity
information to coordinate the decentralized UAV swarm, in order to improve its map coverage efficiency while maintaining high network connectivity. Here we find that the coverage and connectivity performance of the UAV swarm are inversely related to each other. Hence, we use heuristic and reinforcement learning methods to find a connectivity-oriented pheromone-based mobility model that gives the most optimal performance in terms of both coverage and connectivity for UAV swarms.
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