Cooperative Unmanned Autonomous Vehicle Control for Spatially Secure Group Communications

Beyond the individual independent unmanned autonomous vehicle (UAV), cooperative control of multiple UAVs has started to receive significant attention from industry, academia and the military. For the sake of UAV cooperation, proper wireless communication is imperative, but incurs several problems. Among them, spatially secure group communication (SSGC), which must maximize spatial UAV group size while minimizing the communication boundary of the group, is a unique problem for multiple UAV control from a security perspective. In particular, the SSGC problem must be considered for military applications such as multiple unmanned aerial or ground vehicle control. In this paper, we investigate the SSGC problem. To provide a solution, an analytical framework is first presented to model the dynamics of multiple UAVs and SSGC. The theoretical analysis and simulation results regarding how communication affects group dynamics and spatial communication security are also discussed. Our contribution is to suggest a new way to view multiple UAV control with spatially secure communication, and to provide a distributed method to address the problem cooperatively.