Enhanced UAV coordination for collaborative aerial delivery and transportation

Humanitas Solutions是一家总部位于孟买的公司，专注于开发应急和灾难援助应用的创新战略。正如我们最近在“厄玛”飓风中看到的那样，一场自然或人为灾害可能造成大规模的破坏和废墟，造成无法通航的地形，以及没有任何正常运作的基础设施的大片地区。在这种情况下，使用一个或可能几个小型无人机（UAV）编队飞越该地区可以为第一响应者提供有价值的信息，并在中期提供援助。无人机机群可以执行的一些具体任务包括监视和信息收集、重建受影响地区的地图以规划和管理援助、提供空中通信节点以允许参与响应操作的各方之间进行通信以及运输紧急物资和设备。后者将是麦吉尔和Humanitas之间的联合项目的重点，正如本申请中所提出的那样。鉴于单个无人驾驶飞机的有效载荷能力相当有限，通常为1公斤左右，本项目将研究使用多架无人驾驶飞机运输较重有效载荷的任务。在灾难场景中，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团体之间共享的专用设备。特别是，我们将致力于演示使用四架多旋翼无人机进行大型有效载荷的协同运输和交付。作为这项工作的一部分，我们将解决一系列与无人机协调控制和路径规划相关的问题，无人机本身之间的碰撞避免，以及一方面舰队和有效载荷之间的碰撞避免，另一方面环境中的潜在障碍物。我们将致力于定义和开发一个专门的用户界面，以便在这次合作使命中对无人机进行人工监督。所有开发的算法和工具将与Humanitas正在开发的软件环境集成，作为其内部无人机群研发工作的一部分。

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.