Subgroup Differentiation for Aerial Swarm Search and Surveillance in Limited Sensing Areas

With characteristics such as low cost, flexibility, and scalability, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms demonstrate superior performance over single unmanned platforms and manned aircraft in search and surveillance missions. However, the conflicts between individual decisions and the tradeoff between search and connectivity in limited sensing areas still render UAV swarm search and surveillance inherently challenging. This paper proposes a subgroup differentiation-based decision-making framework for the UAV swarm, where two kinds of roles (informers and relays) are considered and each UAV can autonomously switch its role according to the task demand and environmental changes. The relay nodes provide larger communication scopes for connectivity preservation and contribute to the relaxation of informers’ constrained actions. In this way, the informing UAVs can maintain well-preserved explorations during the search process. The subgroup differentiation is based on a distributed framework where two sequentially linked auction-based operators are respectively developed for the action policies of informers and relays. The impact time control guidance is used for simultaneous arrival to realize the synchronous information fusion of swarm search findings. Simulation results demonstrate the efficient explorations, less conservativeness, and higher coverage efficiencies of the proposed method over existing advanced approaches in confined sensing environments.