A Real-Time Flight Safety Alarm System for Multiple UAVs

Abstract

Airborne heterogeneous UAVs can encounter flight control or sensor failures while performing flight tasks. To protect against this, safety alarm systems (SAS) are typically implemented in ground control systems (GCS) to prevent crashes or other failures. Tracing the failure for a single UAV is relatively easy, but it is difficult to manually monitor multiple UAVs flying in a distributed open area. The current paper aims to fulfil this SAS deficiency, a deficiency that is still frequently ignored during GCS development. Our SAS alerts users of no-fly zones as well as navigation, battery, GPS and communication failures. The system can monitor simultaneous multiple UAV-flight failures in real time so that GCS can send appropriate commands to each UAV encountering a problem.