Collaboration Between Autonomous Drones and Swarming

摘要

Recent technological progress, especially in robotics and mechatronics, has made it possible to create autonomous mobile vehicles such as air, ground, surface, or underwater robots. All of these vehicles are referred to as drones or unmanned systems. The focus of this chapter is on air vehicles, but all these systems share a large number of characteristics independently of the environment in which they evolve. This chapter is thus useful reading whatever type of unmanned system you are interested in. Unless stated otherwise, the term drone in what follows will refer to air vehicles.We will also use the terms unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), unmanned aerial system (UAS), and remotely piloted aircraft system (RPAS), the latter being the now official naming. It should be noted that the wording RPAS includes the notion of a remote pilot. Still, in this chapter, the focus is on autonomous systems that do not have a ground pilot, and that consequently need to make their own decisions to achieve the missions that are assigned to them. Why we consider autonomous drones will be explained a bit later in this introduction.