Evaluation of Failure-free Indicators of Swarm of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

As a result of graduate qualification work, a unified mathematical model for estimation of UAV swarm failure rates was developed based on the analysis of methods for assessing the reliability of software, technical equipment, communication systems and ways of their combination. The obtained model was applied to a swarm of four lightweight short-range drones designed to monitor agricultural land. In addition, the work revealed the advantage of using ring and mesh topologies of the communication network over the star topology. The dependencies of UAV swarm uptime indicators obtained from the model, among which are probability of failure-free operation and operational availability factor, were plotted using MATLAB application program package. In the future, the model can be refined by various coefficients reflecting the presence of destructive factors, such as bad weather conditions, low bandwidth of the information transmission channel and the influence of electronic warfare. Also, in the future a family of similar models based on this model can be developed, applicable to other types of UAV swarms of different directions. The graduate qualification work includes 76 pages, 45 figures, 7 tables and 13 literature sources.