Integrating Learning, Optimization, and Prediction for Efficient Navigation of Swarms of Drones

Abstract

Swarms of drones are increasingly been used in a variety of monitoring and surveillance, search and rescue, and photography and filming tasks. However, despite the growing popularity of swarm-based applications of drones, there is still a lack of approaches to generate efficient drone routes while minimizing the risks of drone collisions. In this paper, we present a novel approach that integrates learning, optimization, and prediction for generating efficient and safe routes for swarms of drones. The proposed approach comprises three main components: (1) a high-performance dynamic evolutionary algorithm for optimizing drone routes, (2) a reinforcement learning algorithm for incorporating the feedback and runtime data about the system state, and (3) a prediction approach to predict the movement of drones and moving obstacles in the flying zone. We also present a parallel implementation of the proposed approach and evaluate it against two benchmarks. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach allows to significantly reduce the route lengths and computation overhead while producing efficient and safe routes.