Enhanced UAV coordination for collaborative aerial delivery and transportation

Humanitas Solutions是一家总部位于蒙特利尔的公司，专注于开发应急和灾害援助应用程序的创新战略。正如我们最近目睹的伊尔玛飓风，一场自然灾害或人为灾难可能会留下大规模的破坏和瓦砾，留下无法摧毁的地形，以及没有任何正常运行的基础设施的大片地区。在这种情况下，使用一支机队或可能几支小型无人机机队飞越该地区，可以向急救人员提供宝贵的信息，并在中期内提供协助。无人机机队可以执行的一些具体任务包括监视和信息收集、重建受灾地区地图以规划和管理援助、提供空中通信节点以允许参与应急行动的各方之间的通信以及运输应急用品和设备。后者将是McGill和Humanitas在本申请中提议的联合项目的重点。鉴于一架无人机的有效载荷能力相当有限，通常在1公斤左右，本项目将研究使用几架无人机运输较重有效载荷的任务。在灾难情况下，有效载荷可能是紧急医疗和生存用品，或者是一件可以在不同援助小组之间共享的专用设备。特别是，我们将努力演示使用四架多旋翼无人机协作运输和交付大有效载荷。作为这项工作的一部分，我们将解决与无人机的协调控制和路径规划有关的一系列问题，无人机本身之间的碰撞避免，以及机队和有效载荷之间的问题，以及环境中的潜在障碍。我们将致力于定义和开发一个专门的用户界面，以便在这次合作任务期间对无人机进行人工监督。所有开发的算法和工具都将与Humanitas正在开发的软件环境集成在一起，这是其针对无人机群的内部研发工作的一部分。

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.