Coordination and cooperation of multi UAV systems

Mini and Micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly popular for both civilian and military applications and for academic researchers. In line with the technological developments, this sector has made progress and has become an important focus of interest. Today, the most common usage method of UAVs is the use of a single point-to-point UAV platform for discovery, observation, and detection, search-rescue, or entertainment purposes. Recently, the use of more than one UAV system (multiple) in a coordinated manner has brought some research areas back to the agenda. In this thesis, multiple UAV simulation, coordination/collaboration and monitoring software infrastructures are implemented. The most common open source, autopilot software system (Ardupilot), which is easily implementable to the well-known flight controllers for autonomy UAVs, is used. This software system is integrated with the Gazebo simulation environment, which is widely used by researcher for multi-robot simulations. We present the explanation and use of multiple UAV systems, the coordination and collaboration infrastructure used in multiple UAV systems and tested with real scenarios such as multiple UAV route planning, field scanning and obstacle avoidance algorithms and methods. As a result, a web based multiple UAV coordination, monitoring interface is developed to test these software structures to control and monitor a group of (five) real fixed wing multiple UAVs successfully.