Dynamic self-Organised Algorithm for UAVS swarm

Abstract

There is an increasing interest in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to offer various services, e.g., parcels delivery medical supplies, live video recording and relay to mention but a few. This has therefore increased the number of UAVs that fly in a given environment. So as the UAVS move they need to be collision free. A number of collision avoidance methods have been proposed. The need of operation in urban cities increases the need of the best algorithm to counter act Collision between UAVs and the environment and fellow UAVs. Drones are also used in cases where a task can be performed more economically and or more efficiently than if done by humans. These include remote sensing tasks where drones can be required to form coalitions by pooling their resources to meet the service requirements at different locations of interest in a city. During such coalition formation, finding the shortest path from a source to a location of interest is key to efficient service delivery. This project focuses on developing a dynamic self-organised algorithm for UAV swarm which is to be used by the quadcopters to avoid collision between them and with the other obstacles with in the environment where these quadcopters passes while doing their operations. This was achieved by developing an algorithm which we used to program the UAV quadcopters and it was initially tested with 2 UAVs then 4 UAVs and then 6 UAVs using robotic simulator software (webots) We evaluated the performance of the algorithm by comparing how number of quadcopter used affect the time of mission completion when considered the sensor range distance. We also evaluated the algorithm by considering how the speed of these quadcopters affect the time of mission completion when having different number of quadcopters used in the simulation. Future research should be done on how artificial intelligence can be used in the programing of these quadcopters in order for collision between them to be limited such that the mobility of these quadcopter is managed well.