Constraint-based Formation of Drone Swarms
This work addresses energy conservation and safe operation for drone swarm delivery in urban environments, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing routing and formation methods.
The paper tackles the problem of energy-efficient multi-stop drone swarm delivery in smart cities by introducing an adaptive formation that adjusts to constraints and uses a skyway network for routing, resulting in increased flight range through formation flying.
Drone swarms are required for the simultaneous delivery of multiple packages. We demonstrate a multi-stop drone swarm-based delivery in a smart city. We leverage formation flying to conserve energy and increase the flight range of a drone swarm. An adaptive formation is presented in which a swarm adjusts to extrinsic constraints and changes the formation pattern in-flight. We utilize the existing building rooftops in a city and build a line-of-sight skyway network to safely operate the swarms. We use a heuristic-based A* algorithm to route a drone swarm in a skyway network.