Distributed Coordination for Resilient Multi-UAV Remote Sensing: A Photovoltaic Inspection Case Study
2026-07-27 • Robotics
Robotics
AI summaryⓘ
The authors developed SwarmLink, a system that lets drones work together by talking directly to each other instead of relying on a central controller. This helps drones share tasks and recover if one fails or if the data quality drops, keeping the mission running smoothly. They tested it on inspecting big solar power plants, showing that drones can reassign jobs among themselves without needing help from a ground station. Their approach works with existing drone software without changing it and handles different problems using one simple method.
UAVSwarm roboticsPeer-to-peer communicationRemote sensingDistributed auctionPlatform failure recoveryData quality managementPhotovoltaic inspectionAerostack2
Authors
Guillermo GP-Lenza, Miguel Fernandez-Cortizas, Martin Molina, Pascual Campoy
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.