Recent advances in tactical communications allow high bandwidth, directed line-of-sight (LOS) peer-to-peer information sharing between both manned and unmanned assets, yet current high-bandwidth communications infrastructures for ground and air lack the flexibility to support highly dynamic and mobile operations. Current communications solutions often require manned ground stations and established, planned-out infrastructure, yielding a rigidity which can struggle to meet the demands of highly dynamic Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) environments. Drone Hosted Autonomous Radio Mesh Activity (DHARMA) seeks to augment JADC2 networks when needed and aid in network re-construction in the face of large-scale degradation of these networks. Prior work on DHARMA demonstrated the ability to augment tactical networks with a small swarm of radio-equipped drones in a sprawling urban environment. This work expands DHARMA capabilities to function in a multi-domain environment and allow significant scalability of swarm size over substantially larger and more diverse geographic areas.
Modernization of line-of-sight communications, with beam-forming, mesh networking, and technologies making communications less detectable and susceptible to interference and jamming in contested environments help to secure lines of communications on and on the battlefield. We present a self-adjusting drone-hosted autonomous mesh network to deliver critical data in situations not historically supported by traditional configurations of radios. We develop autonomous collaboration behaviors to maintain a dynamic and adaptive tactical mesh network that ensures high quality communications in uncertain battlefield environments. While recent advances in tactical communications (e.g., 5G, optical, etc.) allow high bandwidth, directed line-of-sight (LOS) peer to peer information sharing between both manned and unmanned assets, current high-bandwidth communications infrastructures for ground and air lack the exibility to support highly dynamic and mobile operations, often requiring manned ground stations and established, planned-out infrastructure. By hosting a tactical mesh network on a swarm of mobile unmanned platforms, we extend the communications range of the network beyond LOS and around occlusions such as terrain and urban sprawl. We achieve this through a combination of rapidly exploring random graphs to identify candidate mesh configurations, non-convex genetic optimization to refine these configurations, and distributed multi-agent control algorithms to maintain the dynamic mesh in-situ. Our solution optimizes resiliency where feasible, often allowing the network to continue to function in the presence of a dead or otherwise compromised agent.
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