Developing an Autonomous Swarm of Small Helicopters: Controlling Cooperative Team Behaviour for Search and

Abstract—This paper describes components for controlling an autonomous swarm of small helicopters to execute search and surveillance tasks. The proposed system will be designed to support and be deployed by land forces. The aim is that the swarm can operate fully autonomously and use cooperative team strategies based on decentralized multiagent system control. The different components of the system are investigated by an interdisciplinary team in the Newcastle Robotics Lab comprising experts from computer engineering, computer science, computer vision, control, electrical engineering, machine learning, mechatronics, optimisation, wireless communications, signal processing and software engineering. The proposed system can help to reduce risk in land force missions that require search and exploration of dangerous or unknown environments. Keywords—Autonomous multi-agent system; decentralised control; reinforcement learning; wireless communication I