Title
Multidepot Drone Path Planning With Collision Avoidance
Abstract
Intersections of flight paths in multidrone missions are indications of a high likelihood of in-flight drone collisions. This likelihood can be proactively minimized during path planning. This article proposes two offline collision-avoidance multidrone path-planning algorithms: 1) DETACH and 2) STEER. Large drone tasks can be divided into smaller ones and carried out by multiple drones. Each drone follows a planned flight path that is optimized to efficiently perform the task. The path planning of the set of drones can then be optimized to complete the task in a short time, with minimum energy expenditure, or with maximum waypoint coverage. Here, we focus on maximizing waypoint coverage. Different from existing schemes, our proposed offline path-planning algorithms detect and remove possible in-flight collisions. They are based on a constrained nearest-neighbor search algorithm that aims to cover a large number of waypoints per flight path. DETACH and STEER perform vector intersection check for flight path analysis, but each at different stages of path planning. We evaluate the waypoint coverage of the proposed algorithms through a novel profit model and compare their performance on a work area with different waypoint densities. Our results show that STEER covers 40% more waypoints and generates 20% more profit than DETACH in high-density waypoint scenarios.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/JIOT.2022.3151791
IEEE Internet of Things Journal
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Collision avoidance,drones,multidepot vehicle routing problem (MDVRP),optimization,path planning,unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)
Journal
9
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
17
2327-4662
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
15
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Kun Shen100.34
Rutuja Shivgan200.34
Jorge Medina300.68
Ziqian Dong410113.99
Roberto Rojas-Cessa530847.00