Distributed Fault-tolerant Drone Network Design

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) or drones have numerous applications in different industries. However, drones have limitations such as short flight time, limited flight range, and navigational inaccuracy in regions with unreliable GPS signal. To mitigate these limitations, using a group of drones to cooperatively perform the mission is proposed. The resulting parallel operation increases the efficiency and reduces the operational time. In addition, we propose a cooperative localization to navigate the group of UAVs as a back-up for GPS navigation. The first step to design such a swarm is to model the dynamics and coordination structure of the drones’ network, which is the subject of this research. The model is enhanced with fault-tolerant navigation data. The connectivity architecture of the network will also be studied for better tolerance in link-loss conditions. This project is a critical step toward our business objective, which is providing services like search and rescue and monitoring services in the northern regions of Canada.

Faculty Supervisor:

Philip Ferguson

Student:

Partner:

North Forge

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

Education; Management of companies and enterprises; Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

University of Manitoba

Program: