GrpAvoid: Multigroup Collision-Avoidance Control and Optimization for UAV Swarm

Collision-avoidance control for UAV swarm has recently drawn great attention due to its significant implications in many industrial and commercial applications. However, traditional collision-avoidance models for UAV swarm tend to focus on avoidance at individual UAV level, and no explicit strategy is designed for avoidance among multiple UAV groups. When directly applying these models for multigroup UAV scenarios, the deadlock situation may happen. A group of UAVs may be temporally blocked by other groups in a narrow space and cannot progress toward achieving its goal. To this end, this article proposes a modeling and optimization approach to multigroup UAV collision avoidance. Specifically, group level collision detection and adaption mechanism are introduced, efficiently detecting potential collisions among different UAV groups and restructuring a group into subgroups for better collision and deadlock avoidance. A two-level control model is then designed for realizing collision avoidance among UAV groups and of UAVs within each group. Finally, an evolutionary multitask optimization method is introduced to effectively calibrate the parameters that exist in different levels of our control model, and an adaptive fitness evaluation strategy is proposed to reduce computation overhead in simulation-based optimization. The simulation results show that our model has superior performances in deadlock resolution, motion stability, and distance maintenance in multigroup UAV scenarios compared to the state-of-the-art collision-avoidance models. The model optimization results also show that our model optimization method can largely reduce execution time for computationally-intensive optimization process that involves UAV swarm simulation.

I. Introduction

With benefits in high payloads, wide-area coverage, and strong collaboration capabilities, the deployment of UAV swarm has shown great potential in many industrial and commercial applications. Many real-life scenarios often require multiple groups of UAVs to work together [1]. Each UAV group needs to perform certain independent but interrelated tasks in cooperation with other groups. The multigroup UAV control is potentially useful in many applications, such as multitarget surveillance and tracking [2], [3]; mobile-edge computing [4]; disaster recovery [5]; and precision agriculture [6]. However, in most existing research on automated control of UAV swarm, the entire UAV swarm is usually treated as a single group, and a collision-avoidance model is developed at the individual-UAV level. Research on multigroup collision-avoidance control and optimization for UAV swarm is still minimal.