Communication‐Aware Information‐Gathering Experiments with an Unmanned Aircraft System

This paper presents single and multiaircraft flight experiments to assess an information‐theoretic path planning algorithm that incorporates sensing and communication to guide an unmanned aircraft. The communication is modeled with packet erasure channels for each link in a multihop mesh network. The planning objective is to maximize the mutual information between the target state and measurements received at a single base station from all aircraft. A novel unmanned aircraft system was developed to facilitate experiments with multiple unmanned aircraft utilizing multihop mesh networking. The value of communication‐aware planning was assessed through flight experiments with a single aircraft localizing a radio emitter. Additional experiments with two aircraft demonstrated and assessed the performance of the approach, showing that the improvement in sensing can be appreciable when utilizing multihop communication.