Communication and cooperation strategies for aerial robotic systems

The utilization of robotic systems in civil applications rapidly increased during the past years. Especially small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are demanded by rescue forces to assist in disaster situations. To overcome the resource limitations of small platforms, trendsetting concepts include cooperating multi-robot systems. The research in this thesis addresses novel mobility strategies and concepts, which allow the collaboration of heterogeneous robotic swarms, based on innovative communication solutions. The holistic system approach considers a variety of essential aspects to enable the collaboration of agent-based systems. Key elements are efficient data structures, reliable communication strategies and methods for distributed decision-making. The main research of this work focuses on communication sensitive mobility strategies and a role-based collaboration concept. The developed solutions address the often competing performance indicators s patial distribution of the sensor equipped robots and their communication performance. The later includes inter-agent as well as agent to end user communication. The innovative mobility strategy Communication-Aware Potential Fields (CAPF) is based on virtual potential fields and calculates attracting and repelling forces depending on specific communication performance indicators. In combination with the distributed role-based behavior, the individual robots are able to change their behavior and function within the swarm. By these means, they can function as on-demand relays to enable reliable communication links over large distances. Essential parts of this research have been successfully demonstrated in real flight experiments within the scope of application driven scenarios.