Contingency Formation Planning for Interactive Drone Light Shows

One of the most appealing applications of drone swarms is drone light shows, in which a group of drones displays an animation by showing a sequence of light patterns in the sky. In this paper, we consider using drone swarms as video game platforms and utilize planning techniques to display pixels in animations correctly while providing a fast response to user inputs. We devise a new sampling algorithm to solve a contingency formation planning problem, which aims to find a contingency formation plan such that drones can always move to the correct positions to display every possible future frame regardless of the user inputs in the future. The algorithm provides interactivity by preemptively relocating hidden drones, which move in stealth mode to the locations of all possible future frames. Our experiments show that the size of the frame buffer and the ratio between the number of drones and the number of pixels can greatly affect the performance of our system.