🤖 AI Summary
为解决无人机群分布式视觉感知中的低延迟问题，提出一种感知感知通信中间件，通过图像处理和优先级调度等方法提高传输效率和质量。
📝 Abstract
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms increasingly support safety-critical applications that rely on distributed visual perception. Meeting the low-latency requirements of these applications can require perception models to execute within the swarm on inference-capable UAVs, creating a need for efficient UAV-to-UAV transport of high-bandwidth perception data. However, the Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements of perception differ from conventional packet-level QoS; successful delivery of individual packets does not ensure that a complete, timely, and usable image is available for inference. We present a novel perception-aware communication middleware that treats complete perception-data samples as the communication objects for which QoS must be satisfied. The middleware extends a lightweight UDP broker-based publish-subscribe architecture with perception-specific services, including image fragmentation and reconstruction, concurrent packet transmission, priority-aware scheduling, and image quality assessment. The middleware is evaluated on a heterogeneous hardware testbed emulating a UAV swarm using YOLOv8n object detection. Experimental results demonstrate low end-to-end application latency, substantially higher throughput than a lightweight UDP broker, effective prioritization of perception traffic under increasing background load, and mitigation of object-detection degradation through middleware-level image quality assessment. This work provides an initial framework for integrating AI-specific data handling into communication middleware to support emerging distributed AI applications in multi-agent mobile cyber-physical systems.