Multi-layered Approach to Safe Navigation of Swarms of Drones

Swarms of drones are complex distributed systems that should operate safely, i.e., avoid collisions with each other and unforeseen objects appearing in the flight zones. Ensuring safety of drone navigation is challenging due to unreliability of drones, communication channels and non-determinism of the operating environment. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-layered approach to ensuring safety of drone navigation. It aims at maintaining an optimal ratio between efficiency of mission execution and safety at a hierarchical distributed way. We formalise the proposed approach in Event-B and derive the coordination and reconfiguration mechanisms ensuring efficiency and safety of mission execution.