UC Irvine

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) systems are being increasingly used in a broad range of scenarios and applications. However, their deployment in urban areas poses important technical challenges. One of the most prominent concerns is robustness of communications between the ground stations and the UAVs in a highly dynamic and crowded spectrum. Indeed, competing data streams may create local or temporary congestion impairing the ground stations to control the UAVs.

The main contribution of this thesis is a robust multi-path communication framework for UAV systems. The framework continuously probes the performance of multiple wireless multi-hop paths from the ground station to each UAV, and dynamically selects the path providing the best performance in terms of packet delay. Numerical results, based on a real-world implementation and extensive field experimentation, demonstrate the ability of the proposed framework to provide robust control against exogenous interference and network congestion.