The First Comprehensive Autonomous Drone Traffic Management System

In a study published in Swarm Intelligence, researchers from Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest, Hungary, have demonstrated the first large-scale autonomous drone traffic solution. This follows the creation of the world's first self-organizing drone flock.

This amazing new technology can do far more than what human pilots could ever do.

Since 2009, the Department of Biological Physics at Eötvös University has been researching group robotics and drone swarms. In 2014, they developed the world's first autonomous quadcopter flock of at least ten units. The research group recently achieved a new milestone by publishing the dense autonomous traffic of 100 drones in the journal Swarm Intelligence.

What is the distinction between flocking and autonomous drone traffic? In the former, the goal of the units is to get perfectly synchronized through coordinated joint movement, such as in a bird flock. However, in a traffic situation, drones may have different paths and aims, which might lead to conflicts.

This is especially true when transportation occurs in open locations rather than established routes, such as pedestrians crossing a square in unpredictable directions or drones flying freely in the sky.

The ELTE researchers addressed this issue by merging a novel, forward-thinking, real-time updating route planner with the interactions of standard bio-inspired flocking models.

As a result, autonomous robots can efficiently avoid most traffic problems while securely managing the remaining ones by collaborating directly with their neighbors.

Simulations were used to assess the effectiveness of the entirely self-organizing model, which did not require central control. During this procedure, they could show continuous high-speed random traffic of up to 5000 drones in two dimensions, with equivalent or varied speeds and priority.

Even stacked three-dimensional cases were mapped to demonstrate the effective response to congested drone traffic conditions in future smart cities and decentralized air traffic management ideas.

The model was then programmed into a hundred-member drone fleet owned by CollMot Robotics Ltd., a firm created within the Department of Biological Physics with the goal of commercializing drone swarm technology. The self-organizing drone traffic was demonstrated live with a hundred drones.

This method paves the way for the beginning of a new phase of automated swarm drone operations in various industries, including defense industry applications, group spraying, and drone-based cargo transport.

CollMot Robotics Ltd., in partnership with ELTE, is a representative of all these goals, relentlessly pushing scientific discoveries into industrial innovations. The company’s founders were rewarded in 2021 with the Innovative Researcher of ELTE award.

Video Credit: ELTE

Journal Reference:

Balázs, B., et. al. (2024) Decentralized traffic management of autonomous drones. Swarm Intelligence. doi:10.1007/s11721-024-00241-y