An Efficient Framework for Target Search with Cooperative UAVs in a FANET

Flying Ad-Hoc Network (FANET) is a special type of Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET) which consists of multiple networked Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Compared to traditional target search using a single UAV, multiple cooperative UAVs within a FANET have the potential to accomplish this work more efficiently, and multi-UAV cooperative target search has attracted increasing research attention in recent years. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive investigation on efficient and accurate multi-UAV cooperative target search techniques. More specifically, we propose several adaptive mobility models and an innovative information fusion mechanism to improve the search efficiency. Meanwhile, to improve the search accuracy, we introduce a low-overhead decision-making mechanism to reduce chances for false target identifications. The simulation results show that the framework outperforms the baseline framework significantly in terms of both efficiency and accuracy. Our experiments also exhibit how individual mechanisms introduced in our work contribute to the improvements on search efficiency or accuracy, therefore providing more guidance for their adoption in practice.