Abstract
This paper presents a beehive-inspired multi-agent drone system for autonomous information collection to support the needs of first responders and emergency teams. The proposed system is designed to be simple, cost-efficient, yet robust and scalable at the same time. It includes several unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that can be tasked with data collection, and a single control station that acts as a data accumulation and visualization unit. The system also provides a local communication access point for the UAVs to exchange information and coordinate the data collection routes. By avoiding peer-to-peer communication and using proactive collision avoidance and path-planning, the payload weight and per-drone costs can be significantly reduced; the whole concept can be implemented using inexpensive off-the-shelf components. Moreover, the proposed concept can be used with different sensors and types of UAVs. As such, it is suited for local-area operations, but also for large-scale information-gathering scenarios. The paper outlines the details of the system hardware and software design, and discusses experimental results for collecting image information with a set of 4 multirotor UAVs at a small experimental area. The obtained results validate the concept and demonstrate robustness and scalability of the system.
Highlights
In response to natural or technological disasters, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are becoming an increasingly valuable asset for experts and first-responder teams [1]
Our system is designed to be flexible such as to allow using any drone on the market that is equipped with the following components: (i) an onboard computer that incorporates an autopilot functionality to fly to a point of interests (POIs) without the need for a human pilot, together with a global positioning system (GPS) module to accurately localize the drone (Section 4.3), (ii) a communication system to transfer information between drones and the DB
First thing that we can observe is that all POIs were measured, which indicates that drones were able to complete the information-gathering task
Summary
In response to natural or technological disasters, UAVs are becoming an increasingly valuable asset for experts and first-responder teams [1]. The proposed concept avoids using long-range drone-to-drone links, in some time-critical scenarios, such as search and rescue, a long-range low data-rate sensor (e.g., LoRa (https://lora-alliance.org/)) can be used on drones to send a geo-referenced alarm signal to the “beehive”; this LoRa signal plays the role of a “nectar” the rescue team is interested in. Such an alarm signal can trigger other, more appropriate systems, such as automated package delivery drone to the recipient or dispatch of a rescue team to the alarm location.
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