This paper proposes a perception-shared and swarm trajectory global optimal (STGO) algorithm fused UAVs formation motion planning framework aided by an active sensing system. First, the point cloud received by each UAV is fit by the gaussian mixture model (GMM) and transmitted in the swarm. Resampling from the received GMM contributes to a global map, which is used as the foundation for consensus. Second, to improve flight safety, an active sensing system is designed to plan the observation angle of each UAV considering the unknown field, overlap of the field of view (FOV), velocity direction and smoothness of yaw rotation, and this planning problem is solved by the distributed particle swarm optimization (DPSO) algorithm. Last, for the formation motion planning, to ensure obstacle avoidance, the formation structure is allowed for affine transformation and is treated as the soft constraint on the control points of the B-spline. Besides, the STGO is introduced to avoid local minima. The combination of GMM communication and STGO guarantees a safe and strict consensus between UAVs. Tests on different formations in the simulation show that our algorithm can contribute to a strict consensus and has a success rate of at least 80% for obstacle avoidance in a dense environment. Besides, the active sensing system can increase the success rate of obstacle avoidance from 50% to 100% in some scenarios.
Energy efficiency is of critical importance to trajectory planning for UAV swarms in obstacle avoidance. In this paper, we present $E^2Coop$, a new scheme designed to avoid collisions for UAV swarms by tightly coupling Artificial Potential Field (APF) with Particle Swarm Planning (PSO) based trajectory planning. In $E^2Coop$, swarm members perform trajectory planning cooperatively to avoid collisions in an energy-efficient manner. $E^2Coop$ exploits the advantages of the active contour model in image processing for trajectory planning. Each swarm member plans its trajectories on the contours o…
Optimized Area Coverage in Disaster Response Utilizing Autonomous UAV Swarm Formations
Tech Hive Labs；Control Systems and Robotics Lab (CSRL)（控制系统与机器人实验室）；National Technical University of Athens（国家技术大学雅典）；Fédération ENAC ISAE-SUPAERO ONERA（ENAC ISAE-SUPAERO ONERA联合会）；AI Innovation Centre（人工智能创新中心）
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；National Engineering Research Center for Industrial Automation (Ningbo Institute)（国家工业自动化工程技术研究中心（宁波研究院））；Huzhou Institute, Zhejiang University（浙江大学湖州研究院）
This paper presents a decentralized and asynchronous systematic solution for multi-robot autonomous navigation in unknown obstacle-rich scenes using merely onboard resources. The planning system is formulated under gradient-based local planning framework, where collision avoidance is achieved by formulating the collision risk as a penalty of a nonlinear optimization problem. In order to improve robustness and escape local minima, we incorporate a lightweight topological trajectory generation method. Then agents generate safe, smooth, and dynamically feasible trajectories in only several millis…
Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克理工大学）；Ricerca sul Sistema Energetico (RSE) S.p.A.（意大利能源系统研究公司（RSE））
This article proposes Persistence Administered Collective Navigation (PACNav) as an approach for achieving decentralized collective navigation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms. The technique is based on the flocking and collective navigation behavior observed in natural swarms, such as cattle herds, bird flocks, and even large groups of humans. As global and concurrent information of all swarm members is not available in natural swarms, these systems use local observations to achieve the desired behavior. Similarly, PACNav relies only on local observations of relative positions of UAVs,…
Secure Multi-hop Telemetry Broadcasts for UAV Swarm Communication
Brandenburg University of Technology, Cottbus, Germany（勃兰登堡技术大学）；IHP - Leibniz Institute for High-Performance Microelectronics, Frankfurt (Oder), Germany（莱比锡高性能微电子研究所）
We present decentralized collision avoidance algorithms for quadrotor swarms operating under uncertain state estimation. Our approach exploits the differential flatness property and feedforward linearization to approximate the quadrotor dynamics and performs reciprocal collision avoidance. We account for the uncertainty in position and velocity by formulating the collision constraints as chance constraints, which describe a set of velocities that avoid collisions with a specified confidence level. We present two different methods for formulating and solving the chance constraints: our first me…
In this paper, we address the problem of collision avoidance for a swarm of UAVs used for continuous surveillance of an urban environment. Our method, LSwarm, efficiently avoids collisions with static obstacles, dynamic obstacles and other agents in 3-D urban environments while considering coverage constraints. LSwarm computes collision avoiding velocities that (i) maximize the conformity of an agent to an optimal path given by a global coverage strategy and (ii) ensure sufficient resolution of the coverage data collected by each agent. Our algorithm is formulated based on ORCA (Optimal Recipr…
This work presents a novel, inference-based approach to the distributed and cooperative flocking control of aerial robot swarms. The proposed method stems from the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) dynamics by limiting the latent set to the robots' feasible action space, thus preventing any unattainable control inputs from being produced and leading to smooth flocking behavior. By modeling the inter-agent relationships using a pairwise energy function, we show that interacting robot swarms constitute a Markov Random Field. Our algorithm builds on the Mean-Field Approximation and incorporates the c…
University of Leeds（利兹大学）；University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）
This paper introduces a testbed to study distributed sensing problems of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) exhibiting swarm intelligence. Several Smart City applications, such as transport and disaster response, require efficient collection of sensor data by a swarm of intelligent and cooperative UAVs. This often proves to be too complex and costly to study systematically and rigorously without compromising scale, realism and external validity. With the proposed testbed, this paper sets a stepping stone to emulate, within small laboratory spaces, large sensing areas of interest originated from e…
South Asian University（南亚大学）；Liverpool Hope University（利物浦希望大学）
Individual agents in natural systems like flocks of birds or schools of fish display a remarkable ability to coordinate and communicate in local groups and execute a variety of tasks efficiently. Emulating such natural systems into drone swarms to solve problems in defence, agriculture, industry automation and humanitarian relief is an emerging technology. However, flocking of aerial robots while maintaining multiple objectives, like collision avoidance, high speed etc. is still a challenge. In this paper, optimized flocking of drones in a confined environment with multiple conflicting objecti…
We present a novel, decentralized collision avoidance algorithm for navigating a swarm of quadrotors in dense environments populated with static and dynamic obstacles. Our algorithm relies on the concept of Optimal Reciprocal CollisionAvoidance (ORCA) and utilizes a flatness-based Model Predictive Control (MPC) to generate local collision-free trajectories for each quadrotor. We feedforward linearize the non-linear dynamics of the quadrotor and subsequently use this linearized model in our MPC framework. Our method is downwash conscious and computes safe trajectories that avoid quadrotors from…
Singular Perception s.r.l（Singular Perception有限责任公司）；Teseo s.r.l.（Teseo有限责任公司）；University of Genoa（热那亚大学）
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming increasingly useful for tasks which require the acquisition of data over large areas. The coverage problem, i.e., the problem of periodically visiting all subregions of an area at a desired frequency, is especially interesting because of its practical applications, both in industry and long-term monitoring of areas hit by a natural disaster. We focus here on the latter scenario, and take into consideration its peculiar characteristic, i.e. the a coverage system should be resilient to a changing environment and not be dependent on pre-existing infras…
Enhancing Drone Light Shows Performances: Optimal Allocation and Trajectories for Swarm Drone Formations
Aerospace Engineering Department, Faculty of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Kocaeli University（航空航天工程系，航空航天学院，科伊亚利大学）；Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Aviation and Space Exploration (IRC-ASE), KFUPM（航空与航天探索交叉研究中心（IRC-ASE），国王费萨尔大学）
Exploring Unstructured Environments using Minimal Sensing on Cooperative Nano-Drones
Computer Vision and Aerial Robotics Group at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid（马德里理工大学计算机视觉与空中机器人小组）；Centre for Automation and Robotics C.A.R. (UPM-CSIC)（自动化与机器人中心（UPM-CSIC））；Department of Mechanical Engineering, Texas A&M University（机械工程系，德克萨斯A&M大学）
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)（洛桑联邦理工学院）
Decentralized drone swarms deployed today either rely on sharing of positions among agents or detecting swarm members with the help of visual markers. This work proposes an entirely visual approach to coordinate markerless drone swarms based on imitation learning. Each agent is controlled by a small and efficient convolutional neural network that takes raw omnidirectional images as inputs and predicts 3D velocity commands that match those computed by a flocking algorithm. We start training in simulation and propose a simple yet effective unsupervised domain adaptation approach to transfer the …
College of Aeronautics and Engineering, Kent State University（肯特州立大学航空与工程学院）
A human-swarm cooperative system, which mixes multiple robots and a human supervisor to form a heterogeneous team, is widely used for emergent scenarios such as criminal tracking in social security and victim assistance in a natural disaster. These emergent scenarios require a cooperative team to quickly terminate the current task and transit the system to a new task, bringing difficulty in motion planning. Moreover, due to the immediate task transitions, uncertainty from both physical systems and prior tasks is accumulated to decrease swarm performance, causing robot failures and influencing …
University of Turku（图尔库大学）；King Faisal University（费萨尔国王大学）
The focus of this work is to present a novel methodology for optimal distribution of a swarm formation on either side of an obstacle, when evading the obstacle, to avoid overpopulation on the sides to reduce the agents' waiting delays, resulting in a reduced overall mission time and lower energy consumption. To handle this, the problem is divided into two main parts: 1) the disturbance phase: how to morph the formation optimally to avoid the obstacle in the least possible time in the situation at hand, and 2) the convergence phase: how to optimally resume the intended formation shape once the …
University of Turku（图尔库大学）；Connected Shopping Ltd（Connected Shopping 有限公司）；King Faisal University（费萨尔国王大学）
This work focuses on low-energy collision avoidance and formation maintenance in autonomous swarms of drones. Here, the two main problems are: 1) how to avoid collisions by temporarily breaking the formation, i.e., collision avoidance reformation, and 2) how do such reformation while minimizing the deviation resulting in minimization of the overall time and energy consumption of the drones. To address the first question, we use cellular automata based technique to find an efficient formation that avoids the obstacle while minimizing the time and energy. Concerning the second question, a near-o…
The paper focuses on collision-inclusive motion planning for impact-resilient mobile robots. We propose a new deformation recovery and replanning strategy to handle collisions that may occur at run-time. Contrary to collision avoidance methods that generate trajectories only in conservative local space or require collision checking that has high computational cost, our method directly generates (local) trajectories with imposing only waypoint constraints. If a collision occurs, our method then estimates the post-impact state and computes from there an intermediate waypoint to recover from the …
FLIP: Real-Time and Resilient Formation Planning for Large-Scale DIstributed Swarms via Point Cloud Registration
Institute of Cyber-Systems and Control, College of Control Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University（浙江大学控制科学与工程学院智能系统与控制研究所）；Huzhou Institute, Zhejiang University（浙江大学湖州研究院）
Multi-sensory Anti-collision Design for Autonomous Nano-swarm Exploration
University of Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）；KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）；ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IDSIA), USI-SUPSI（USI-SUPSI 达尔·莫勒人工智能研究所（IDSIA））
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）
This paper presents a data-driven approach to learning vision-based collective behavior from a simple flocking algorithm. We simulate a swarm of quadrotor drones and formulate the controller as a regression problem in which we generate 3D velocity commands directly from raw camera images. The dataset is created by simultaneously acquiring omnidirectional images and computing the corresponding control command from the flocking algorithm. We show that a convolutional neural network trained on the visual inputs of the drone can learn not only robust collision avoidance but also coherence of the f…
Coventry University（考文垂大学）；Autonomous Vehicles & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AVAILab), Centre for Future Transport and Cities（自动驾驶车辆与人工智能实验室（AVAILab）、未来交通与城市中心）
Real-time multi-agent collision-avoidance algorithms comprise a key enabling technology for the practical use of self-organising swarms of drones. This paper proposes a decentralised reciprocal collision-avoidance algorithm, which is based on stigmergy and scalable. The algorithm is computationally inexpensive, based on the gradient of the locally measured dynamic cumulative signal strength field which results from the signals emitted by the swarm. The signal strength acts as a repulsor on each drone, which then tends to steer away from the noisiest regions (cluttered environment), thus avoidi…
Communication-Free Collective Navigation for a Swarm of UAVs via LiDAR-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology（机械工程系，釜山国立科学技术研究院）；Department of Mechanical Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（机械工程系，韩国科学技术院）
In recent years, reinforcement learning and its multi-agent analogue have achieved great success in solving various complex control problems. However, multi-agent reinforcement learning remains challenging both in its theoretical analysis and empirical design of algorithms, especially for large swarms of embodied robotic agents where a definitive toolchain remains part of active research. We use emerging state-of-the-art mean-field control techniques in order to convert many-agent swarm control into more classical single-agent control of distributions. This allows profiting from advances in si…
Swarms of autonomous agents are useful in many applications due to their ability to accomplish tasks in a decentralized manner, making them more robust to failures. Due to the difficulty in running experiments with large numbers of hardware agents, researchers often make simplifying assumptions and remove constraints that might be present in a real swarm deployment. While simplifying away some constraints is tolerable, we feel that two in particular have been overlooked: one, that agents in a swarm take up physical space, and two, that agents might be damaged in collisions. Many existing works…
Self-Organizing Aerial Swarm Robotics for Resilient Load Transportation : A Table-Mechanics-Inspired Approach
School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学自动化科学与电气工程学院）；Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学机械与自动化工程系）
Flying by Inference: Active Inference World Models for Adaptive UAV Swarms
Department of Engineering and Naval Architecture (DITEN), University of Genoa（工程与 naval 架构系（DITEN），热那亚大学）；Intelligent Systems Laboratory, Department of Systems Engineering and Automation, Carlos III University of Madrid（智能系统实验室，系统工程与自动化系，马德里卡洛斯三世大学）
Defending against Intrusion of Malicious UAVs with Networked UAV Defense Swarms
Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT), University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg（安全、可靠与信任 interdisciplinary 中心（SnT），卢森堡大学，卢森堡）；Faculty of Science, Technology and Communication (FSTC), University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg（科学、技术与通信学院（FSTC），卢森堡大学，卢森堡）
Collision avoidance is one of the most important topics in the robotics field. The goal is to move the robots from initial locations to target locations such that they follow shortest non-colliding paths in the shortest time and with the least amount of energy. In this paper, a distributed and real-time algorithm for dense and complex 2D and 3D environments is proposed. This algorithm uses angular calculations to select the optimal direction for the movement of each robot and it has been shown that these separate calculations lead to a form of cooperative behavior among agents. We evaluated th…
Clutter Resilient Occlusion Avoidance for Tightly-Coupled Motion-Assisted Detection
Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；University of Macau（澳门大学）；Weizmann Institute of Science（魏茨曼科学研究所）；Southern University of Science Technology（南方科技大学）
AVOID-JACK: Avoidance of Jackknifing for Swarms of Long Heavy Articulated Vehicles
Chair for Computational Intelligence, Otto-von-Guericke-University（计算智能系，奥托·冯·格里克大学）；Fraunhofer Institute for Transportation and Infrastructure Systems IVI（交通与基础设施系统研究所）
Universidad Complutense de Madrid（马德里康普顿斯大学）；University of Granada（格拉纳达大学）；Research Centre for Information and Communication Technologies (CITIC-UGR)（信息与通信技术研究中心（CITIC-UGR））；School of Robotics, Hunan University（湖南大学机器人学院）
