On unmanned aerial vehicles light show systems: Algorithms, software and hardware

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) light shows (UAV-LS) have a wow factor due to their advantages in terms of environment friendliness and controllability compared to traditional fireworks. In this paper, a UAV-LS system is developed including a collision-free formation transformation trajectory planning algorithm, a software package that facilitates animation design and real-time monitoring and control, and hardware design and realization. In particular, a dynamic task assignment algorithm based on graph theory is proposed to reduce the impact of UAV collision avoidance on task assignment and the frequency of task assignment in the formation transformation. In addition, the software package consists of an animation interface for formation drawing and 3D animation simulation, which helps the monitoring and control of UAVs through a real-time monitoring application. The developed UAV-LS system hardware consists of subsystems of decision-making, real-time kinematic (RTK) global positioning system (GPS), wireless communication, and UAV platforms. Outdoor experiments using six quadrotors are performed and details of implementations of high-accuracy positioning, communication, and computation are presented. Results show that the developed UAV-LS system can successfully complete a light show and the proposed task assignment algorithm performs better than traditional static ones.