Communication Architecture for Autonomous Aerial Traffic Management

This paper presents a multi-agent communication paradigm for autonomous aerial traffic management. Multi-drone missions based on the existing ROS-based communication architecture heavily depend on the master node, and communication delay between nodes might not be sufficient for efficient inter-agent collision avoidance. In this paper, we have proposed a hybrid ROS-ROS2 communication architecture for centralised traffic management with the provision of distributed communication for collision avoidance and conflict resolution at intersections. The base station server responsible for traffic management runs on a ROS2 environment, ROS is used for communication with each onboard autopilot, and an intermediate add-on-module interfaces ROS and ROS2 messages. The content of the communication packets between the different nodes is decided based on the design requirements. Overall communication architecture is validated through simulation and hardware experiments.