In the past decade, unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) have been widely used in various civilian applications, most of which involve only a single unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). In the near future, more and more UAS applications will be facilitated by the cooperation of multiple UAVs. In such applications, it is desirable to utilize a general control platform for cooperative UAVs. However, existing open-source control platforms cannot fulfill such a demand because (1) they only support the leader-follower mode, which limits the design options for fleet control, (2) existing platforms can support only certain type of UAVs and thus lack compatibility, and (3) these platforms cannot accurately simulate a flight mission, which may cause a big gap between simulation and real-world flight. To address these issues, we propose a general control and monitoring platform for cooperative UAS, namely, CoUAS , which provides a set of core cooperation services of UAVs, including synchronization, connectivity management, path planning, energy simulation, and so on. To verify the applicability of CoUAS, we design and develop a prototype in which an embedded path planning service is provided to complete any task with the minimum flying time while considering the network connectivity and coverage. Experimental results by both simulation and field test demonstrate that the proposed system is viable.

中文翻译：

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CoUAS

在过去的十年中，无人机系统（UAS）已广泛用于各种民用应用，其中大部分仅涉及单个无人机（UAV）。在不久的将来，越来越多的无人机应用将通过多架无人机的合作来促进。在此类应用中，需要为协作无人机使用通用控制平台。然而，现有的开源控制平台无法满足这样的需求，因为（1）它们只支持leader-follower模式，这限制了机队控制的设计选择，（2）现有平台只能支持某些类型的无人机，因此缺乏兼容性，以及（3）这些平台无法准确模拟飞行任务，这可能导致模拟与现实世界的飞行存在很大差距。为了解决这些问题，CoUAS，它提供了一套无人机的核心协同服务，包括同步、连接管理、路径规划、能量模拟等。为了验证 CoUAS 的适用性，我们设计并开发了一个原型，其中提供嵌入式路径规划服务，以在考虑网络连接和覆盖范围的同时以最短的飞行时间完成任何任务。仿真和现场测试的实验结果表明，所提出的系统是可行的。