Negotiating between communication and cooperation for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles

The emerging technologies of multiple, cooperative unmanned systems have brought in an exciting period of possibilities, possibilities of solving challenging problems in medical, social, engineering, and military communities. The technologies have also introduced a growing number of new challenges such as resource allocation, communication and coordination, establishment of consensus, and control optimization among cooperative systems. In this paper, we address one of these challenges for cooperative unmanned aerial systems (UASs): trade-off between maintaining communication reliability among, and collective target search efforts by, a team of unmanned systems. We evaluate the impact on the overall search capability of a cooperative system when the movements of its members are constrained due to the requirement of communication reliability. Our comparative study is based on an adaptation of work reported in and we show our findings using simulation and flight experiment results.