Coordinated Multi-UAV Adaptive Exploration Under Recurrent Connectivity Constraints

In the field of multi-UAV collaborative exploration, communication is one of the most fundamental capabilities for effective target deployment and collaborative exploration during mission execution. In order to increase the quality and meet the real-time requirement in various real world situation, collaborate communication strategy has already been a research hotspot both in academia and industry. Recurrent connectivity is a representative strategy with which UAVs do not need to be connected to the base station all the time unless a specific event is triggered. However, in current researches based on the recurrent connectivity strategy, the condition threshold for triggering a new connection is set to be a fixed value during all mission process. This configuration lacks adaptability in real world mission with dynamic and various situations. This paper proposes a dynamic replanning mechanism, and establishes an adaptive multi-UAV collaborative exploration strategy based on recurrent connectivity. Extensive experiments in a well constructed simulation environment were done and the results show that the proposed strategy provides good situation awareness ability at the base station, while our strategy performs an efficient explanation in both complex and simple environments, it has a stronger ability to adapt to complex environments especially.