네트워크 유량 알고리즘을 이용한 다중 드론 경로 계획

초록

The aerial show of 1,218 drones in the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics was realized by animators drawing up the show with 3D design software in advance and by a central computer determining and assigning onsite which drone will play the role of which pixel in the animation. Manual creation of an animation in which a thousand drones move in harmony without collision is an expensive and difficult task. Thus, we propose a drone simulator to automate this process: given initial and final images, the system samples a given number of initial and final locations of drones, computes collision-free drone paths automatically (each starting from an initial location and arriving at a final location), and visualizes the results as a video. The set of drone paths is optimal in terms of the last arrival time, which is a desirable feature for drone paths. We propose two methods of computing the paths: a two-phase algorithm with a collision-removal modification and a single-phase algorithm for cost optimization. The former obtains paths by running a maximum flow algorithm and modifies them to be collision-free. On the other hand, the latter computes collision-free paths directly by running a minimum cost maximum flow algorithm with a carefully designed cost assignment. Both sets of output paths have a minimum last arrival time. The single-phase method needs more time than the two-phase method but gives much better values of stretch factor (the ratio of path length to the Euclidean distance between the initial and final locations). This trade-off between computation time and stretch factor is revealed empirically in the performance comparison of the two methods.

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