With the skies full of drones, how can drone collisions be avoided? Inspired by flocking models in nature, researchers in Hungary have come up with an algorithm to handle large volumes of autonomous drones safely.

Previous reports of the use of drones, for example to replace  fireworks for Hogmanay in Scotland and July 4th displays in the USA, for promotional purposes and to achieve new Guinness word records, have marvelled at impressive tightly controlled choreographed displays - and even then some drones have fallen out of the sky. 

Writing software for drone displays is one level of complexity - but how about a solution to ensure that autonomous drones flying at high speeds in densely crowded airspace don't crash into one another. This is what researchers at Robotics Laboratory of the Department of Biological Physics at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary together with Collmot, the company it formed in 2015, have been working on, building on ealier work on collaborativew swarm control.

Collmot's CEO,Gábor Vásárhelyi, together with Professor Tamás Vicsek and Boldizsár Balázs provide details in this video:

This video is support material for a paper, titles "Decentralized traffic management of autonomous drones" published by Springer this month in Swarm Intelligence and available on open access. 

Referring to the fact that in the US over 800,000 drones already want to occupy the same airspace as around 200,000 manned aircraft the researchers set out to creating an automated traffic control system that would scale up to the densities of drones predicted to be seen in future smart cities.

A specific feature of their system it that it is designed to allow the drones to avoid conflict even when operating independently. This is achieved either by routing them around other drones in advance or coordinating with nearby neighbors if a collision is imminent.

The system was tested in simulations of up to 5,000 individual drones across two-dimensional airspace, with the potential to layer the system for three-dimensional traffic control and the real-world demonstration in the video showed it working with 100 physical drones.

More Information

Decentralized traffic management of autonomous drones by Boldizsár Balázs, Tamás Vicsek, Gergő Somorjai, Tamás Nepusz & Gábor Vásárhelyi 

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