An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Swarm System for Tunnel Inspection Problems

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have shown great significance for multiple industries in recent years, including photographing, agriculture, delivering, and transportation. The development of UAV has replaced and upgraded these applications due to the flexibility and intelligence. However, most of the current UAVs can only accomplish simple tasks, where the UAVs cannot change their operation mode in a single task. In this paper, a UAV swarm system is proposed to solve some complicated tasks, and the UAVs in the swarm can change their modes by the optimal decision from our swarm intelligent collaborative system (SICS). Additionally, we illustrate the complicated task of UAV-based tunnel inspection problems, where the UAVs can optimize and change their operation modes to maximize inspected distance. Some case studies have been worked out to show the viability of the proposed UAV swarm system, along with the performance of the proposed SICS for determining the optimal solutions.