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1. Proactive Distributed Emergency Response With Heterogeneous Tasks Allocation

   https://doi.org/10.1155/dsn/5552310  

   Darko, Justice; Park, Hyoshin (January 2025, International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks)

   Lee, Seokcheon (Ed.)

   Traditionally, traffic incident management (TIM) programs coordinate the deployment of emergency resources to immediate incident requests without accommodating the interdependencies on incident evolutions in the environment. However, ignoring these inherent interdependencies while making current deployment decisions is shortsighted, and the resulting naive deployment strategy can significantly worsen the overall incident delay impact on the network. The interdependencies on incident evolution in the environment, including those between incident occurrences and those between resource availability in near‐future requests and the anticipated duration of the immediate incident request, should be considered through a look‐ahead model when making current‐stage deployment decisions. This study develops a new proactive framework based on the distributed constraint optimization problem (DCOP) to address the above limitations, overcoming conventional TIM models that cannot accommodate the dependencies in the TIM problem. Furthermore, the optimization objective is formulated to incorporate unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The UAVs’ role in TIM includes exploring uncertain traffic conditions, detecting unexpected events, and augmenting information from roadway traffic sensors. Robustness analysis of our model for multiple TIM scenarios shows satisfactory performance using local search exploration heuristics. Overall, our model reports a significant reduction in total incident delay compared to conventional TIM models. With UAV support, we demonstrate a further decrease in the total incident delay ranging between 5% and 45% for the different number of incidents. UAVs’ active sensing can shorten response time of emergency vehicles and reduce uncertainties associated with the estimated incident delay impact. 

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2. Distributed Monitoring of Moving Thermal Targets Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Gaussian Mixture Models

   https://doi.org/10.3390/robotics14070085  

   Huang, Yuanji; Sripathanallur_Murali, Pavithra; Vejarano, Gustavo (July 2025, Robotics)

   This paper contributes a two-step approach to monitor clusters of thermal targets on the ground using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) in a distributed manner. The approach is tailored to networks of UAVs that establish a flying ad hoc network (FANET) and operate without central command. The first step is a monitoring algorithm that determines if the GMM corresponds to the current spatial distribution of clusters of thermal targets on the ground. UAVs make this determination using local data and a sequence of data exchanges with UAVs that are one-hop neighbors in the FANET. The second step is the calculation of a new GMM when the current GMM is found to be unfit, i.e., the GMM no longer corresponds to the new distribution of clusters on the ground due to the movement of thermal targets. A distributed expectation-maximization algorithm is developed for this purpose, and it operates on local data and data exchanged with one-hop neighbors only. Simulation results evaluate the performance of both algorithms in terms of the number of communication exchanges. This evaluation is completed for an increasing number of clusters of thermal targets and an increasing number of UAVs. The performance is compared with well-known solutions to the monitoring and GMM calculation problems, demonstrating convergence with a lower number of communication exchanges. 

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3. Distributed Cooperative Spectrum Sharing in UAV Networks Using Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

   https://doi.org/10.1109/CCNC.2019.8651796  

   Shamsoshoara, Alireza; Khaledi, Mehrdad; Afghah, Fatemeh; Razi, Abolfazl; Ashdown, Jonathan (February 2019, 16th IEEE Annual Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC))

   In this paper, we develop a distributed mechanism for spectrum sharing among a network of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and licensed terrestrial networks. This method can provide a practical solution for situations where the UAV network may need external spectrum when dealing with congested spectrum or need to change its operational frequency due to security threats. Here we study a scenario where the UAV network performs a remote sensing mission. In this model, the UAVs are categorized to two clusters of relaying and sensing UAVs. The relay UAVs provide a relaying service for a licensed network to obtain spectrum access for the rest of UAVs that perform the sensing task. We develop a distributed mechanism in which the UAVs locally decide whether they need to participate in relaying or sensing considering the fact that communications among UAVs may not be feasible or reliable. The UAVs learn the optimal task allocation using a distributed reinforcement learning algorithm. Convergence of the algorithm is discussed and simulation results are presented for different scenarios to verify the convergence. 

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4. Collaborative multi-robot multi-human teams in search and rescue.

   Williams, R. (April 2020, Proceedings of the International ISCRAM Conference)

   Robots such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) deployed for search and rescue (SAR) can explore areas where human searchers cannot easily go and gather information on scales that can transform SAR strategy. Multi-UAV teams therefore have the potential to transform SAR by augmenting the capabilities of human teams and providing information that would otherwise be inaccessible. Our research aims to develop new theory and technologies for field deploying autonomous UAVs and managing multi-UAV teams working in concert with multi-human teams for SAR. Specifically, in this paper we summarize our work in progress towards these goals, including: (1) a multi-UAV search path planner that adapts to human behavior; (2) an in-field distributed computing prototype that supports multi-UAV computation and communication; (3) behavioral modeling that fields spatially localized predictions of lost person location; and (4) an interface between human searchers and UAVs that facilitates human-UAV interaction over a wide range of autonomy. 

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5. Deep Q-Network Based Power Allocation Meets Reservoir Computing in Distributed Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks

   https://doi.org/10.1109/INFCOMW.2019.8845152  

   Song, Hao; Liu, Lingjia; Chang, Hao-Hsuan; Ashdown, Jonathan; Yi, Yang (May 2019, IEEE INFOCOM 2019 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS))

   Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) is regarded as one of the key enabling technologies for future communication networks. In this paper, we introduce a power allocation strategy for distributed DSA networks using a powerful machine learning tool, namely deep reinforcement learning. The introduced power allocation strategy enables DSA users to conduct power allocation in a distributed fashion without relying on channel state information and cooperations among DSA users. Furthermore, to capture the temporal correlation of the underlying DSA network environments, the reservoir computing, a special class of recurrent neural network, is employed to realize the introduced deep reinforcement learning scheme. The combination of reservoir computing and deep reinforcement learning significantly improves the efficiency of the introduced resource allocation scheme. Simulation evaluations are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the introduced power allocation strategy. 

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