A Platform for Autonomous Swarms of UAVs

Abstract

The usage of aerial drones has become more popular as they also become more accessible, both in economic and usability terms. Nowadays, these vehicles can present reduced dimensions and a good cost-benefit ratio, which makes it possible for several services and applications supported by aerial drone networks to emerge. Taking into account the enormous diversity of use cases, many of the existing solutions for autonomous control focus on specific scenarios. Generic mission planning platforms also exist, but most of them only allow missions consisting of linear waypoints to be traversed. These situations translate into a mission support that is not very flexible. This paper proposes a modular infrastructure that can be used in various scenarios, enabling the autonomous control and monitoring of a fleet of aerial drones in a mission context. The platform allows the communication with the flight controller so that it can collect telemetry data and send movement instructions to the drone, and to monitor this data and send the commands remotely, also enabling robust mission planning with multiple drones, and enabling the interaction with internal and external sensors. The real tests performed through the platform show that the planned missions are executed exactly as they are planned in the platform.