Collision-free cooperative Unmanned Aerial Vehicle protocols for sustainable aerial services

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are offering many global industry sectors the opportunity to adopt more sustainable business models. They offer innovative ways of managing resources and water and offer newer opportunities to address key challenges in many areas like border surveillance, precision agriculture and search and rescue missions. All these new applications areas tend to require the cooperation of groups, or “swarms” of UAVs to provide collaborative sensing and processing solutions. These new scenarios impose new requirements in terms of safety, coordination, and operation management. This paper provides an overview of some of the technical challenges that multirotor UAVs are still facing in terms of aerial coordination and interaction. In this regard, it focusses on recent developments available in the literature and presents some contributions realised during the past few years by the authors addressing UAV interaction to achieve collision-free flights and swarm-based missions. Based on the analysis provided in this work, the paper is able to provide insight into the challenges still open that need to be solved in order to enable effective UAV-based solutions to support sustainable aerial services.