Abstract
Multi-UAV systems are attracting, especially in the last decade, the attention of researchers and companies of very different fields due to the great interest in developing systems capable of operating in a coordinated manner in complex scenarios and to cover and speed up applications that can be dangerous or tedious for people: search and rescue tasks, inspection of facilities, delivery of goods, surveillance, etc. Inspired by these needs, this work aims to design, implement and analyze a trajectory planning and collision avoidance strategy for multi-UAV systems in 3D environments. For this purpose, a study of the existing techniques for both problems is carried out and an innovative strategy based on Fast Marching Square—for the planning phase—and a simple priority-based speed control—as the method for conflict resolution—is proposed, together with prevention measures designed to try to limit and reduce the greatest number of conflicting situations that may occur between vehicles while they carry out their missions in a simulated 3D urban environment. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated successfully on the basis of certain conveniently chosen statistical measures that are collected throughout the simulation runs.
Highlights
Multi-UAV systems are attracting, especially in the last decade, the attention of researchers and companies of many different fields due to the great interest in developing systems able to operate in a coordinated manner in complex scenarios and to cover and speed up applications that can be dangerous or tedious for people
It may be necessary to coordinate the position and movements to maintain communication between UAVs in order to exchange some kind of information [6]. This may be necessary to cover an area in a coordinated manner [7] and may be needed to manipulate an object jointly [8]
This coordination can be studied at different levels: at a trajectory planning level, at a level of modeling and control of the vehicles, as a manipulation or communication between drones problem [9] or as a task allocation issue [10]
Summary
Multi-UAV systems are attracting, especially in the last decade, the attention of researchers and companies of many different fields due to the great interest in developing systems able to operate in a coordinated manner in complex scenarios and to cover and speed up applications that can be dangerous or tedious for people. These can be found in the military, commercial or governmental domains and include search and rescue tasks [1,2], inspection of facilities [3], delivery of goods [4] and surveillance [5], among other fields.
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