GAs for Drone Flight Control

Summary

This chapter introduces a popular application of Genetic Algorithm (GAs) to a real‐life problem, namely flight control of a drone that operates as a member of a swarm. Typically, a drone is capable of making its own flight decisions. In this example application, we assume that the goal for each drone is to spread uniformly over an area of interest such that each drone positions itself as far away from its near neighbours as its communication range allows. Drone flight control is selected for the chapter to illustrate the power of GAs in handling these otherwise intractable problems. In Python and Matlab implementations of this flight control algorithm, we show that relatively simple scripts can successfully realize a GA for a set of autonomous drones operating as a swarm. In these simple scripts, we see that drone speed and communication range are the major variables to prevent swarm partitioning.