With the recent technological advances in small-scale aerial vehicles, deployment of three-dimensional (3D) vehicular and sensor networks for civil applications becomes increasingly probable. Especially, networks of aerial and ground robots equipped with various sensors are expected to be deployed for monitoring, surveillance, disaster
management, etc. Our research provides a high level architecture for the design of collaborative multiple aerial robot systems that consist of vehicles with on-board sensors and embedded processing, and sensing, coordination, and communication&networking capabilities. We analyze a multi-UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) system consisting of quadrotors and demonstrate its potential in disaster assistance and monitoring scenarios.

Research topics in unmanned vehicle/robot networks

The key scientific goals of our research on collaborative aerial robots include the following:

• coordination of robots (e.g. movement and task execution)
• mission planning
• wireless networking (e.g. robust multimedia streaming)
• application in real-world disaster management

With my PhD students, I focus on autonomous path planning strategies for unmanned aerial relay networks and on addressing the challenges imposed by communication and networking limitations for aerial monitoring and disaster management applications. We are not only involved in designing and developing algorithms but also in building an experimental test-bed to accurately establish the challenges and implications of deploying aerial relay nodes in the expected safety and security applications. We have completed the Collaborative microdrones (cDrones) and Self-organizing Network of Intelligent UAVs (SINUS) projects. We continue  our research in UAV networks with a focus on joint coordination and communication algorithms and navigation in forests for ecological analysis (Forest-iMATE).

Selected Publications:

S. Hayat, E. Yanmaz, and R. Muzaffar, “Survey on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Networks for Civil Applications: A Communications Viewpoint,” IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, to appear, 2016.

A. Khan, E. Yanmaz, and B. Rinner, “Information Exchange and Decision Making in Micro Aerial Vehicle Networks for Cooperative Search,” IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems, vol. 2, no.4, pp. 335-347, Dec. 2015.

E. Yanmaz, R. Kuschnig, and C. Bettstetter, “Achieving Air-Ground Communications in 802.11 Networks with Three-Dimensional Aerial Mobility,” Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM 2013, Apr. 2013.