Adaptive dual mode operational swarm control for resilient asset defense under communication jamming

Abstract

Cooperative unmanned-aerial-vehicle (UAV) swarm architectures considered in this study rely on inter-agent communication for distributed coordination. In the evaluated consensus baseline, coordination degrades sharply as packet loss approaches 40%, motivating a control architecture that remains operational when shared information becomes unreliable. We present ADMOS (Adaptive Dual-Mode Operational Swarm), an architecture comprising three coordinated elements: (i) distributed state estimation using Covariance Intersection (CI), which provides consistent fusion under unknown cross-correlation when its covariance assumptions hold; (ii) a hybrid supervisor that transitions each agent between cooperative and autonomous operation using hysteresis and a positive minimum dwell time to bound switching in the implemented controller; and (iii) a higher-order control-barrier-function (HOCBF) safety filter, solved as a quadratic program at 10 Hz, that provides the corresponding forward-invariance certificate when the tightened constraints are feasible and the stated uncertainty bound holds. Under the stated dynamics, bounded-disturbance, common-equilibrium, and dwell-time assumptions, we derive a conditional input-to-state-stability (ISS) bound for each admissible global mode assignment and switching sequence satisfying the stated Lyapunov conditions, and explicitly identify the conditions under which the certificate does not apply. In 80-trial simulations per scenario using a high-fidelity quadrotor simulator, ADMOS achieved asset-protection rates of 92.5% under healthy links and 84.0% under full jamming, compared with 78.4% and 42.0%, respectively, for the consensus baseline; no safety violations were observed in the evaluated trials under feasible operation and the stated sensing/uncertainty conditions. Ablation experiments quantify the contribution of the individual architectural elements. The observed resilience is associated with transitioning from cooperative estimation and control to bounded autonomous operation when shared information becomes unreliable; the claim is restricted to the evaluated scenarios and analytical assumptions.