LAEI: Layered Autonomous Edge Intelligence Framework for Robust UAV Swarm Operations

2026-06-08

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of achieving scalability, task coherence, and robustness in drone swarms operating under communication constraints, environmental uncertainty, and component failures. To this end, the authors propose a hierarchical autonomous edge-intelligent cooperative control framework that integrates onboard reinforcement learning–driven local decision-making with lightweight, task-level adaptive supervision. The framework incorporates mechanisms such as dynamic task reassignment, fault-aware recovery, and context-guided policy adaptation to effectively unify local perception with global coordination. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly reduces mission completion time, improves area coverage efficiency, and maintains a low collision rate while preserving strong distributed decision-making capabilities.

Abstract

Autonomous UAV swarms require scalable coordination mechanisms that maintain mission performance under limited communication, environmental uncertainty, and component failures. Centralized approaches provide global coordination but suffer from communication bottlenecks and single-node vulnerabilities, whereas fully decentralized methods often lack mission-level consistency. This paper presents Layered Autonomous Edge Intelligence (LAEI), a UAV-swarm framework that combines onboard learned policies with lightweight mission-level supervision. Each UAV performs local perception, obstacle avoidance, and action selection onboard, while the supervisory layer provides adaptive goal reassignment, fault-aware recovery, and context-dependent policy guidance without directly controlling low-level actions. LAEI further incorporates recovery strategies, including dynamic reassociation, backup supervisory support, and fallback local autonomy, to maintain mission continuity under representative failure scenarios. We evaluate LAEI in simulated UAV-swarm scenarios using mission completion time, collision rate, and coverage efficiency. The results show that LAEI reduces mission completion time and improves operational efficiency while maintaining collision-aware distributed UAV-level decision-making.

Problem

• UAV swarm
• autonomous coordination
• mission consistency
• communication constraints
• fault tolerance

Innovation

• Layered Autonomous Edge Intelligence
• UAV swarm
• decentralized coordination
• fault-aware recovery
• onboard learning