Distributed Coordination for Resilient Multi-UAV Remote Sensing: A Photovoltaic Inspection Case Study

2026-07-27

AI Summary

This work addresses the vulnerability of multi-UAV remote sensing missions to communication disruptions and platform failures when relying on centralized ground stations, which often lead to gaps in sensing coverage and hinder autonomous recovery. To overcome this, the authors propose SwarmLink—a non-intrusive inter-vehicle communication architecture that, without modifying existing flight control systems, unifies initial task allocation, failure-induced recovery, and data-quality-triggered rescheduling into a single runtime re-auctioning mechanism. Built upon a peer-to-peer distributed auction algorithm and lightweight communication middleware, SwarmLink extends the Aerostack2 framework to enable fully decentralized, ground-intervention-free robust coordination. Experimental validation in photovoltaic power plant inspections demonstrates the system’s capability to autonomously handle three critical disturbances—communication link failures, UAV malfunctions, and low-quality data—throughout the entire mission lifecycle.

Abstract

Deploying multiple UAVs for remote sensing enables proportional reductions in mission time, but realizing these benefits requires the fleet to coordinate at runtime: distributing sensing targets, responding to platform failures, and recovering from degraded data quality. In inspection campaigns, where mission value depends on complete coverage and the usability of every capture, a centralized ground-station coordinator is a single point of failure: a lost link or station fault leaves sensing gaps that cannot be filled without operator intervention. We propose the \textbf{SwarmLink}, an inter-agent communication infrastructure that non-invasively extends any existing aerial framework with peer-to-peer coordination capability, without modifying the host system. We apply it to photovoltaic plant inspection as a representative large-scale sensing campaign, extending Aerostack2 with a distributed auction that unifies initial sensing-target allocation, platform-failure recovery, and data-quality-triggered reassignment into a single runtime mechanism. All three disruption scenarios reduce to the same re-auction over remaining targets and active platforms, requiring zero modifications to the Aerostack2 core and no ground-station involvement during the mission.

Problem

• multi-UAV coordination
• resilience
• remote sensing
• single point of failure
• photovoltaic inspection

Innovation

• SwarmLink
• distributed coordination
• multi-UAV
• peer-to-peer communication
• resilient remote sensing