Enhanced UAV coordination for collaborative aerial delivery and transportation

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Humanitas Solutions is a Montreal-based company focusing on the development of innovative strategies foremergency and disaster assistance applications. As we recently witnessed with hurricane Irma, a natural orman-made disaster can leave behind destruction and debris of massive proportions, terrains that cannot benavigated and large areas without any functioning infrastructure. In such a scenario, the use of a fleet orpossibly several fleets of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) flying over the area can provide valuableinformation to first responders, and for assistance over intermediate term. Some specific tasks that can becarried out by a UAV fleet include surveillance and information gathering, reconstruction of the map of theaffected area for planning and managing the assistance, provision of aerial communication nodes to allowcommunication between the parties involved in the response operations, and transport of emergency suppliesand equipment. It is the latter that will be the focus of the joint project between McGill and Humanitas, asproposed in this application. Given the rather limited payload capacity of a single drone, typically on the orderof 1 kg, the task of transporting a heavier payload using several drones will be investigated in this project. In adisaster scenario, the payload may represent emergency medical and survival supplies or a piece of specializedequipment that can be shared between different aid groups. In particular, we will work towards demonstratingcollaborative transport and delivery of a large payload using four multi-rotor UAVs. As part of this work, wewill address a range of issues related to coordinated control and path planning for the drones, collisionavoidance between the drones themselves, as well as, between the fleet and payload on one hand and potentialobstacles in the environment on the other. We will work on defining and developing a specialized userinterface to allow human supervision of the drones during this collaborative mission. All algorithms and toolsdeveloped will be integrated with the software environment that is being developed by Humanitas as part of itsinternal R&D efforts on UAV swarms.