Decentralized traffic management of autonomous drones
This addresses the legal and technological bottleneck of managing increasing numbers of autonomous drones in common airspace, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing decentralization concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of coordinating autonomous drones in shared airspace by proposing a decentralized algorithm that enables self-organization into safe and efficient traffic flow. It demonstrates feasibility with an experiment coordinating 100 drones in a circular area of 125 meters radius.
Coordination of local and global aerial traffic has become a legal and technological bottleneck as the number of unmanned vehicles in the common airspace continues to grow. To meet this challenge, automation and decentralization of control is an unavoidable requirement. In this paper, we present a solution that enables self-organization of cooperating autonomous agents into an effective traffic flow state in which the common aerial coordination task - filled with conflicts - is resolved. Using realistic simulations, we show that our algorithm is safe, efficient, and scalable regarding the number of drones and their speed range, while it can also handle heterogeneous agents and even pairwise priorities between them. The algorithm works in any sparse or dense traffic scenario in two dimensions and can be made increasingly efficient by a layered flight space structure in three dimensions. To support the feasibility of our solution, we experimentally demonstrate coordinated aerial traffic of 100 autonomous drones within a circular area with a radius of 125 meters.