Command & Control in UAVs Fleets: Coordinating Drones for Ground Missions in Changing Contexts

Abstract

Save-And-Rescue missions often present risks for first responders when their mission occurs in hazardous or risky environments. Thanks to significant advances in robotics and Artificial Intelligence, deploying a swarm of Unmanned Aerial Vehicules (UAVs) (also known as drones) for these missions, has become a promising direction to facilitate first responders’ work. However, despite these recent advances, this remains a difficult challenge because of the ever changing environment and operation conditions the drones evolve in. Ideally, drones should collaborate and share information about the situation, and eventually report back to the humans involved when key decisions have to be taken, freeing up time and human resources for other challenging and crucial tasks.

Command & Control (C2) is a military concept that studies how a set of entities and resources may be best deployed, organised, and driven towards the achievement of tasks at the service of a high-level objective. With the recent increase in distributiveness and variety of information, C2 found new interesting application areas (disaster relief and financial operations; mass vaccination campaigns; etc.)

This paper explores the meaning of implementing C2 in UAV fleets for deployment in large ground missions such as Save-And-Rescue, as a way to systematically implement human-to-drones and drones-to-human communications. We capture in a metamodel the specification of a C2 system that describe how teams of drones work collaboratively, based on a C2 approach. We show how the C2 System may evolve when change is detected, while keeping the C2 System coherent.