  In the past decade, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used in
various civilian applications, most of which only require a single UAV. In the
near future, it is expected that more and more applications will be enabled by
the cooperation of multiple UAVs. To facilitate such applications, it is
desirable to utilize a general control platform for cooperative UAVs. However,
existing open-source control platforms cannot fulfill such a demand because (1)
they only support the leader-follower mode, which limits the design options for
fleet control, (2) existing platforms can support only certain UAVs and thus
lack of compatibility, and (3) these platforms cannot accurately simulate a
flight mission, which may cause a big gap between simulation and real flight.
To address these issues, we propose a general control and monitoring platform
for cooperative UAV fleet, namely, CoUAV, which provides a set of core
cooperation services of UAVs, including synchronization, connectivity
management, path planning, energy simulation, etc. To verify the applicability
of CoUAV, we design and develop a prototype and we use the new system to
perform an emergency search application that aims to complete a task with the
minimum flying time. To achieve this goal, we design and implement a path
planning service that takes both the UAV network connectivity and coverage into
consideration so as to maximize the efficiency of a fleet. Experimental results
by both simulation and field test demonstrate that the proposed system is
viable.
