Dynamic Recovery and a Resilience Metric for UAV Swarms Under Attack

Unmanned Aerial Swarms are attracting widespread interest in fields such as disaster response, environmental monitoring, and agriculture. However, there is still a lack of effective recovery strategies and comprehensive performance metrics for UAV swarms facing communication attacks, especially in capturing dynamic recovery. The aim of this study is to recover the split and disconnected UAV swarm under attacks. A dynamic recovery method is proposed under attacks by establishing the relationship between algebraic connectivity and consensus speed. The proposed recovery method enables each UAV to selectively establish communication links with responsive UAVs based on the proposed recovery method to reduce communication cost, rather than linking with all neighbours within communication range. Based on this, a set of performance indexes is introduced, considering factors such as consensus ability, communication efficiency, mission execution, and resource consumption. Furthermore, a resilience metric is proposed to quantitatively assess the efficiency of recovery and consensus transition, providing a comprehensive measure of the ability to reach consensus after attacks. Simulations utilizing the second-order consensus protocol and dynamics validate that the consensus speed of the proposed recovery method is 18.88% faster than random recovery. The proposed resilience metric captures the change in the time from recovery to new consensus state, and the resilience of the proposed recovery method is 66.99% higher than random recovery.