Implementing Mission-Critical UAV Swarm Coordination Through the Integration of LoRa and ROS Frameworks

摘要

The operation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has emerged as a promising enabling technology in many mission-critical operations. The ability of UAVs to communicate is essential for receiving and transmitting commands, telemetry data, and other payload information. This work proposes a wireless communication system using an integrated LoRa-ROS (long range communication - robot operating system) implementation of the two popular protocols for communication and coordination, respectively. The system is designed for UAV-to-X (UAV/GCS - ground control station) applications. The LoRa protocol, with its long-range and low-power features, is well-suited for UAV-to-X communication, especially in remote or rural areas, or during disasters, where the traditional cellular/WiFi networks are unavailable or unreliable. At the same time, ROS provides the necessary software framework to orchestrate the behavior of the UAVs and ensure seamless multi-agent coordination. The developed prototype system is implemented and empirically tested on a number of UAVs and ground control stations, and the results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed solution.