Flight Formation of Quad-Copters in Presence of Dynamic Obstacles Using Mixed Integer Linear Programming

This paper proposes the implementation of Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) for efficient path planning of UAVs in various flight formations. The Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) taking part in a cooperative flight are assumed to be equipped with Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) which enables sharing the flight information with neighboring aircrafts. The design and implementation of the flight formation algorithm have been carried out for a general case, such that multiple UAVs with arbitrarily geographically located base stations can take part in the formation flight and collision avoided path planning. The paper formulates the problem of path of planning in the framework of MILP and proposes a cost function that minimizes time and energy consumption. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been verified via a number of simulations carried out using different scenarios.