An architecture for distributed decision making in a multi-agent UAV monitoring system

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have proved to have a significant role in a plethora of applications (e.g., agriculture, search and rescue missions, infrastructure surveillance, area monitoring) and when clustered into collaborating groups are able to implement complex and cumbersome tasks efficiently. Systems of multiple autonomous UAVs can be seen as a system of moving sensors, which can be designed with design-making properties, in order to automate and optimize the gathering data process. If each UAV agent is provided with data processing functionalities in addition to data gathering, the system is transformed to a distributed system with great scalability capabilities. This paper presents a decentralized architecture for a UAV multi-agent system designed for area monitoring.