Towards a Realtime, Collision-Free Motion Coordination and Navigation System for a UAV Fleet

This paper presents a realtime, collision-free motion coordination and navigation system for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) fleet. The proposed system uses geographical locations of the UAVs and of the successfully detected, static and moving obstacles to predict and avoid: (1) UAV-to-UAV collisions, (2) UAV-to-static-obstacle collisions, and (3) UAV-to-moving-obstacle collisions. Our collision prediction approach leverages efficient runtime monitoring and Complex Event Processing (CEP) to make timely predictions. A distinctive feature of the proposed system is its ability to foresee a risk of a collision in realtime and proactively find best ways to avoid the predicted collisions in order to ensure safety of the entire fleet. We also present a simulation-based implementation of the proposed system along with an experimental evaluation involving a series of experiments. The results demonstrate that the proposed system successfully predicts and avoids all three kinds of collisions in realtime. Moreover, it generates efficient UAV routes, has an excellent runtime performance, efficiently scales to large-sized problem instances involving dozens of UAVs and obstacles, and is suitable for some densely populated, cluttered flying zones.