Efficient and coordinated vertical takeoff of UAV swarms

Abstract

As we witness the unrelenting growth of the UAV sector, novel and more sophisticated applications keep emerging every year, with many more in the horizon. Among these, applications that require the adoption of UAV swarms are among the most complex, as deploying swarms requires the interaction and cooperation of all the UAVs involved, which can become quite challenging. In this work we specifically focus on the swarm takeoff procedure for UAVs of the Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) type, proposing a heuristic that achieves reduced computing overhead while introducing near-optimal assignments of UAV positions in the swarm formation selected. Such heuristic is complemented by an efficient and collision-free takeoff approach that relies on adequate ordering and inter-UAV communications to achieve a sequential phased takeoff. A large number of experiments using our own ArduSim emulation platform, which is totally compatible with real drone code, evidence the improvements achieved in terms of time overhead and safety when compared to both ideal and agnostic approaches.