Relative View of a Multi-Drone Swarm: An IoT-based Approach

Swarm of Drones (SWD) has received significant attention in various applications, including aerial transportation, agriculture, warfields, and disaster scenarios. SWDs designed for such applications mostly need to operate in a decentralized setting where access to cloud services is often unavailable. For example, an agricultural farm in a remote village, or in a disaster situation, a stable Internet connection to link with the cloud services may be either not available or highly limited. However, in any such applications, maintaining tight coordination among the drones is very important to effectively achieve the target. A global view of the whole swarm with the relative position of a drone (DR) w.r.t. the others plays a crucial role in this context. Although use of GPS is a possible solution, continuous access to GPS may not be always possible. In this work, we propose an alternative lightweight IoT- based solution to achieve the goal. DR-s are supposed to use low- power inter-DR communication which is exploited for estimating their relative positions and an overall view. We leverage recent advancements in Synchronous-Transmission (ST)-based many-to- many data-sharing solutions to enable the process to execute in real-time. Extensive simulation-based studies demonstrate that, the proposed solution can quite accurately derive global view across a wide range of possible arrangements of the DRs in an SWD in real-time.