Robust Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Network Design in a Dense Obstacle Environment

Highly robust networks can resist attacks, as when some UAVs fail, the remaining UAVs can still transmit data to each other. In order to improve the robustness of a multi-UAV network, most methods construct the network by adjusting the positions of the UAVs and adding a large number of links. However, having a large number of links greatly consumes communication resources and increases serious signal interference. Therefore, it is necessary to study a method that can improve robustness and reduce the number of links. In this paper, we propose a method that consists of combining formation control and link selection, which can work in a distributed manner. For formation control, our method keeps the UAVs compact in the obstacle environment through an improved artificial potential field. The compact formation enables UAVs to have a large number of neighbors. For link selection, reinforcement learning is used to improve the robustness of the network and reduce the number of network edges. In the simulation of the 3D urban environment, three failure modes are used to verify the robustness of the network. The experimental results show that even if the number of links is reduced by 20%, the networks designed by our method still have strong robustness.