Sistema anti-colisiones para multicópteros basado en comunicaciones inalámbricas

Abstract

[EN] The use of multicopters is spreading rapidly due to their wide scope of application. This means that, as time goes by, the risk of collision between these devices significantly increases. Moreover, solutions where swarms of multicopters are used to solve more complex problems through cooperation are being proposed. Both cases require multicopters to communicate among them to coordinate their flight, something that is only being done at an experimental level at this moment. The main objective of this project is to develop a simulation environment to design communication protocols among multicopters, enabling collaboration among them. The simulator will permit to analyse the implemented protocols with no need for field tests, which will reduce the implementation time and the risk of damage on multicopters. Field tests have been made to analyse the packet loss according to the distance between multicopters to properly emulate the communications link. As reference, a WiFi Ad-hoc link in the 5 GHz band has been used. The simulator has reached its final development status, and is completely stable with up to six multicopters running at the same time. The application scalability is limited due to the use of virtual machines, but a few changes in its design will allow scaling it significantly in the future. The development of a collision avoidance solution among multicopters has been the first use of the simulator. Experiments show that the collision avoidance protocol is robust enough, as it has avoided collisions on all the tests that have been done.

En este proyecto se propone desarrollar un protocolo anti-colisiones para drones. El protocolo se basa en comunicaciones inalámbricas ad-hoc entre los drones para que éstos puedan intercambiar periódicamente su ubicación y ruta para detectar posibles problemas. En caso de que se detecten trayectorias de colisión, ambos drones deberán automáticamente modificar su ruta para evitar la colisión. Para el desarrollo se incluye la implementación de un simulador de drones en el que evaluar el protocolo.