Distributed coordinated motion control of multiple UAVs oriented to optimization of air-ground relay network

A novel adaptive model-based motion control method for multi-UAV communication relay is proposed, which aims at improving the networks connectivity and the communications performance among a fleet of ground unmanned vehicles. The method addresses the challenge of relay UAVs motion control through joint consideration with unknown multi-user mobility, environmental effects on channel characteristics, unavailable angle-of-arrival data of received signals, and coordination among multiple UAVs. The method consists of two parts: (1) Network connectivity is constructed and communication performance index is defined using the minimum spanning tree in graph theory, which considers both the communication link between ground node and UAV, and the communication link between ground nodes. (2) A multi-UAV motion control strategy is proposed that combines Improved Particle Swarm Optimization (IPSO) and Distributed Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (DNMPC), where the Kalman filter is utilised to estimate future positions of the mobile nodes. Simulation results in both single and complex environments show that the presented method can drive the UAVs to reach or track the optimal relay positions and improve network performance, while demonstrating the benefits of considering the impact of environments on channel characteristics.