Cooperative Intelligence-based UAV Swarm for Establishing Emergency Communication

Over the past decade, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarm has emerged as a disruptive force reshaping our lives and work. Benefiting from its fast and flexible deployment capabilities, UAV swarms have been widely applied to emergency communications. In the event of damaged ground communication base stations, UAV swarms can quickly reconstruct an emergency communication network. However, considering the limited coverage power of a single UAV node, it underscores the need for effective coordination among swarm units as well as diligent planning of a coverage trajectory. In this paper, we propose a cooperative intelligence-based UAV swarm approach for establishing emergency communications. We model a multi-UAV base station-assisted emergency communication scenario as a team Markov game model. To achieve cooperative collaboration among multiple UAVs, we propose a Q-function mixing network based coverage trajectory planning algorithm. Our experimental results demonstrate the superior convergence speed and throughput of the proposed algorithm.