Collision-free Navigation and Efficient Scheduling for Fleet of Multi-Rotor Drones in Smart City

Recently, multi-rotor drones, commonly seen as flying Internet-of-things (IoT) devices, have witnessed a drastic usage in many smart city applications due to their three-dimensional (3D) mobility and flexibility. Collectively, drones can be used to accomplish different short-term and long-term missions requiring low altitude motion. In such a scenario, an effective routing and scheduling of the drone swarms is required to ensure efficient energy management, collision-free navigation, and accurate mission accomplishment. In this paper, we propose a low complexity framework to determine shortest trajectories and time plans for each member of the fleet while taking into account the different constraints. Collision is avoided by forcing some of the drones to statically hover to allow their peers to safely pass the path segment. Selected scenarios are investigated to show the efficiency of the routing and scheduling framework. The impact of some of the system parameters on the fleet behavior is also investigated.

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