Coordination and Flight Control of a Swarm of UAVs

Radar-based remote sensing systems have great advantages over optical sensors due to their robustness against weather influences and the possibility to penetrate the ground.
The use of multicopters or UAVs allows much more flexible measurement scenarios than comparable systems on aircraft or satellites.

A swarm of such multicopters offers further possibilities that cannot be realized with a single measurement platform. For example, it can be used to set up a radar network and allow cooperative radar measurements across several platforms. It can also speed up the measurement process. The challenge here is the coordination and flight control of multiple platforms to ensure safe joint radar operation of the drone swarm.

The objective of this work is the design and implementation of radar measurements between two (or more) drones at the same time.  In order that the UAVs do not interfere with each other, a coordination or synchronization (trigger) shared between the platforms is required to be realized. To do so, there are several possibilities which are to be evaluated and one or two of them to be implemented on the system. The developed conept should be validated using two of the institute's UAVs.