Controlled mobility and efficient communications in an auto-organized drone fleet – CONCERTO

Drones are increasingly pervading our lives for commercial, recreational and military purposes. The applications range from civil and scientific monitoring to surveillance in emergencies, from search and tracking of people and objects to transportation and entertainment. The next step of individual drones is to consider a fleet of drones that will cooperate to perform tasks that would not be possible with a single drone. With the emergence of low-cost, fast-paced, wireless technologies (such as Wi-Fi), drones equipped with wireless communication interfaces can exchange information with each other, send information to and receive information from a ground station, allowing them to coordinate and operate in a collaborative manner. While communications are necessarily considered in a fleet of drones, they currently remain only a means of exchanging information within the fleet, and the communications performance is not exploited to improve the outcomes of the operations accomplished by the drones.

In the CONCERTO project (mobilité Contrôlée et cOmmunicatioNs effiCaces dans une flottE de dRones auTo-Organisée), the goal is to work towards a better consideration of wireless communications in the self-organization solutions of a fleet of drones to ensure robust connectivity within the fleet and guarantee quality of wireless communications among the drones and in end-to-end communications (e.g. between drones and the ground station). The controlled mobility solutions proposed in this project will allow the drones to determine their position and their transmission rate ensuring good performance for communications and better operations provided by the fleet. Based on effective communications and on self-organization schemes, we will also work on the implementation of solutions for localization, navigation and fleet control allowing a collective movement of drones. The intended application context is the deployment of fleets of drones in outdoor environment with a couple of fixed obstacles for the establishment of a robust wireless communications network and the accomplishment of some observation tasks requiring high throughput like transmitting videos. A demonstrator will be implemented to show the feasibility and the contributions of this project.

The results obtained in the CONCERTO proposal will have an impact on all defense and civil applications using fleets of drones.