Swarm Flight Control for Multiple Drones Based on Learning Type Flocking Algorithm

Abstract

In recent years, the utilization of drone for pesticide spraying, load carriage, infrastructure inspection, and remote sensing has been proceeded because it is able to improve the work efficiency and the safety. In particular the utilization of multiple drones in the field of agriculture will enable to reduce the total time of pesticide spraying. On the other hand there are some examples flying multiple drones as the application to art and entertainment. Thus the opportunity of swarm flight control for multiple drones is expected to increase gradually. Therefore, this research aims at the realization of swarm flight control which is useful in the field of agriculture and amusement and so on. The swarm flight control simulation according to human operation using the flocking algorithm Boids well-known for the group behavior simulation of birds and fish was performed in this research. Boids is a kind of computer algorithm expressing swarm flight of birds based on three basic rules. In this research the parameters of three basic rules were tuned by genetic algorithm (GA). Moreover the experiment of evaluation for the operationability was performed after an operator controls one or multiple drones.