Towards Drone Flocking Using Relative Distance Measurements

Andreas Brandstätter, Scott A. Smolka, Scott D. Stoller, Ashish Tiwari, Radu Grosu

Abstract: We introduce a method to form and maintain a flock of drones only based on relative distance measurements. This means our approach is able to work in GPS-denied environments. It is fully distributed and therefore does not need any information exchange between the individual drones. Relative distance measurements to other drones and information about its own relative movement are used to estimate the current state of the environment. This makes it possible to perform lookahead and estimate the next state for any potential next movement. A distributed cost function is then used to determine the best next action in every time step. Using a high-fidelity simulation environment, we show that our approach is able to form and maintain a flock for a set of drones.