Cooperative Multi-UAV Conflict Avoidance Planning in a Complex Urban Environment

Kaiping Wang, Mingzhu Song and Meng Li
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Kaiping Wang: Department of Civil Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
Mingzhu Song: Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen 518055, China
Meng Li: Department of Civil Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 12, 1-21

Abstract: Trajectory planning is of great value and yet challenging for multirotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications in a complex urban environment, mainly due to the complexities of handling cluttered obstacles. The problem further complicates itself in the context of autonomous multi-UAV trajectory planning considering conflict avoidance for future city applications. To tackle this problem, this paper introduces the multi-UAV cooperative trajectory planning (MCTP) problem, and proposes a bilevel model for the problem. The upper level is modeled as an extended multiple traveling salesman problem, aiming at generating trajectories based on heuristic framework for multi-UAV task allocation and scheduling and meanwhile considering UAV kinodynamic properties. The lower level is modeled as a holding time assignment problem to avoid possible spatiotemporal trajectory conflicts, where conflict time difference is analyzed based on the proposed state-time graph method. Numerical studies are conducted in both a 1 km 2 virtual city and 12 km 2 real city with a set of tasks and obstacles settings. The results show that the proposed model is capable of planning trajectories for multi-UAV from the system-level perspective based on the proposed method.

Keywords: multi-UAV; cooperative trajectory planning; conflict avoidance; holding time (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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