Automatic generation of detailed flight plans from high-level mission descriptions

Abstract

Drones are increasingly popular since they promise to simplify a myriad of everyday tasks. Currently vendors provide low-level APIs and basic primitives to program drones, making mission development a task-specific and error-prone activity. As a consequence, current approaches are affordable only for users that have a strong technical expertise. Then, it emerges the need for software engineering techniques supporting the definition, development, and realization of missions involving swarms of autonomous drones while guaranteeing the safety today's users expect. In this paper we consider mission specifications expressed through a domain-specific modeling language which can be effectively used by end-users with no technical expertise, e.g., firefighters and rescue workers. Our generation method automatically derives the lower level logic that each drone must perform to accomplish the specified mission, prevents collisions between drones and obstacles, and ensures the preservation of no-fly zones.