Collision-aware formation assignment of quadrotors

Formation flight of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) is in an active development and spreads more widely in many areas of human activity nowadays. One of the basic problems in their application is a formation assignment and formation control. Many authors work in the direction of coordination control and multiple UAV path planning, discarding problems of collision avoidance when following the trajectories to the assigned target positions in dense formations. A novel formulation of the collision-aware formation assignment problem and a centralized turn-based algorithm to solve the problem of realizability of assignment and provide the optimal solution by several criteria is proposed in this paper. Besides the formation assignment solution, the priority of movement to avoid deadlocks is obtained. The approach consists of three stages: 1) obtaining of solution of assignment problem; 2) validation of realizability of optimal solution with simultaneous determination of acceptable turn order; 3) in case of unrealizability the next optimal solution is being validated. The proposed algorithm is validated with simulation results, which confirm the possibility of real time application. (c) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 14th International Symposium "Intelligent Systems".