Adaptive Data Sharing Algorithm for Aerial Swarm Coordination in Heterogeneous Network Environments (Short Paper)

With the development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems, multi-UAV cooperation has attracted noticeable attention. In response to the communication constraints faced in UAV swarm coordination, both the lazy and the eager strategies were proposed to enable swarm-wide reliable information exchange to further behavior coordination for UAV swarms. However, these two algorithms are only evaluated in a fixed and homogeneous network scenario. Hence, how to choose the proper information exchange strategy for a UAV swarm in realistic dynamic and heterogeneous network environments remains an open while interesting problem. Therefore, in this paper, we first evaluate the convergence and payload cost of both strategies for robotic swarms in realistic network scenarios. Then we propose a novel online adaptive information exchange strategy by adopting single relay selection schemes to ensure low payload and fast convergence in various network environments. Numerical results reveal our novel strategy performs well across different network scenarios in terms of convergence and payload cost, showing its robustness, adaptive capability and potential applications in UAV swarms.