Collapsing and Closing Unmanned Air Vehicle Swarms

AFRL researchers are exploring an adaptive and reconfigurable unmanned air vehicle (UAV) swarm configuration known as "collapsing and closing UAV swarms." This approach to developing UAV swarms is suitable for a number of multifunction radio frequency (RF) applications in challenging environments such as urban and mountainous regions. Figures 1a-1c illustrate the basic approach. In Figure 1a, a long-range search UAV swarm collectively forms a scanning RF aperture. The swarm's scanning RF aperture interrogates a region of interest to detect high-clutter, discrete objects such as buildings or mountains. As depicted in Figure 1b, once the swarm detects these large, obscuring objects, it "collapses and closes" in on the region between the objects. This allows the swarm configuration to interrogate the embedded channels between the buildings or mountains to look for signal leakage points within these large objects, and once detected, these leakage points facilitate cavity interrogation.1 After the swarm has finished interrogating the embedded channels and cavities, it reconfigures itself for RF long-range remote sensing with regard to the next region of interest, as illustrated by Figure 1c.