Evaluation of Safety-Centric Redundancy Architectures in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Swarm Operations

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarm technology has rapidly evolved over the past decade, presenting unprecedented capabilities and complex safety challenges for autonomous systems. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of safety-centric redundancy architectures specifically designed for UAV swarm operations in mission-critical environments. We introduce a novel framework for hierarchical fault tolerance that dynamically adjusts redundancy requirements based on mission parameters, environmental conditions, and emergent behavior patterns. Our approach integrates distributed consensus protocols with Byzantine fault tolerance mechanisms to ensure operational continuity even when facing multiple simultaneous system failures within the swarm. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed architecture achieves a 99.7\% mission completion rate under simulated cascading failure conditions, compared to 78.4\% for conventional redundancy approaches. Furthermore, the framework reduces computational overhead by 42.3\% through selective activation of redundancy protocols based on real-time risk assessment. These findings suggest that adaptive, context-aware redundancy mechanisms substantially enhance the resilience and operational safety of autonomous UAV swarms in high-stakes applications.