Decentralized UAV Swarms for Ground Target Protection in GPS- and Communication-Denied Environments
Authors: Dimitria Silveria, Paulo Ricardo Marques de Araujo, Tiago Nascimento, Sidney Givigi
Organizations: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the Ingenuity Labs Research Institute, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada · School of Computing and the Ingenuity Labs Research Institute, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada · Lab of Systems Engineering and Robotics (LASER), Department of Computer Systems, Universidade Federal da Para´ıba, and with the Department of Cybernetics, Czech Technical University in Prague, Prague 16629, Czechia
The presence of UAVs in military operations has recently increased, also increasing the demand for defense systems against UAV attacks. UAVs can also be used as countermeasures. Most available methods rely on UAV-to-UAV communication and global positioning. However, such resources may not be available in modern warfare scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose a pipeline for ground-target protection against UAV attacks that employs autonomous swarms of UAVs. We assume a communication- and GPS-denied environment in which the UAVs use onboard sensors to track the target and coordinate as a swarm. We developed Kalman filters to estimate the states of unknown targets and the positions of UAVs in the swarm using only relative measurements. Also, our strategy is to encircle the target of interest to maximize coverage. To achieve that, we propose a decentralized swarm encirclement technique that adapts to the target's motion. Our approach was extensively validated using real robots, demonstrating its effectiveness in detecting, encircling, and intercepting hostile UAVs.