Improving Motion Safety and Efficiency of Intelligent Autonomous Swarm of Drones

• Main Authors: Amin Majd, Mohammad Loni, Golnaz Sahebi, Masoud Daneshtalab
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-08-01
• Series: Drones
• Subjects: safe navigation; evolutionary computing; swarm of drones
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2504-446X/4/3/48

Interest is growing in the use of autonomous swarms of drones in various mission-physical applications such as surveillance, intelligent monitoring, and rescue operations. Swarm systems should fulfill safety and efficiency constraints in order to guarantee dependable operations. To maximize motion safety, we should design the swarm system in such a way that drones do not collide with each other and/or other objects in the operating environment. On other hand, to ensure that the drones have sufficient resources to complete the required task reliably, we should also achieve efficiency while implementing the mission, by minimizing the travelling distance of the drones. In this paper, we propose a novel integrated approach that maximizes motion safety and efficiency while planning and controlling the operation of the swarm of drones. To achieve this goal, we propose a novel parallel evolutionary-based swarm mission planning algorithm. The evolutionary computing allows us to plan and optimize the routes of the drones at the run-time to maximize safety while minimizing travelling distance as the efficiency objective. In order to fulfill the defined constraints efficiently, our solution promotes a holistic approach that considers the whole design process from the definition of formal requirements through the software development. The results of benchmarking demonstrate that our approach improves the route efficiency by up to 10% route efficiency without any crashes in controlling swarms compared to state-of-the-art solutions.