Resilient UAV Swarm with Fast Connectivity Recovery and Extensive Coverage

Abstract

To address partial node failures in unmanned aerial vehicle swarms, self-healing communication techniques are commonly employed to restore backbone connectivity while preserving area coverage. However, existing heuristic methods struggle to scale under large-scale failures and dynamic conditions, while learning-based approaches often suffer from spatial collapse, resulting in significant coverage loss. To overcome these limitations, we propose a resilient self-healing framework that enables rapid connectivity recovery and wide-area coverage through a divide-and-conquer strategy. First, we introduce a buffered dynamic virtual force expansion mechanism that categorizes pairwise distances into repulsive, neutral, and attractive zones, allowing nodes to disperse appropriately while preserving communication links and maintaining safety buffers. Subsequently, we design a multipartite graph convolution module to reason over subnetwork-level interactions and facilitate cross-subnetwork reconnection with global structural awareness. Finally, we develop an adaptive fusion strategy that combines both outputs with time-aware weighting to generate the final motion decisions. Experimental results in both random and uniform deployment scenarios demonstrate that our approach outperforms many state-of-the-art methods in terms of connectivity restoration speed and communication coverage.