Sensorless and Coordination-Free Lane Switching on a Drone Road Segment—A Simulation Study

Copter-type UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) or drones are expected to become more and more popular for deliveries of small goods in urban areas. One strategy to reduce the risks of drone collisions is to constrain their movements to a drone road system as far as possible. In this paper, for reasons of scalability, we assume that path-planning decisions for drones are not made centrally but rather autonomously by each individual drone, based solely on position/speed/heading information received from other drones through WiFi-based communications. We present a system model for moving drones along a straight road segment or tube, in which the tube is partitioned into lanes. We furthermore present a cost-based algorithm by which drones make lane-switching decisions, and evaluate the performance of differently parameterized versions of this algorithm, highlighting some of the involved tradeoffs. Our algorithm and results can serve as a baseline for more advanced algorithms, for example, including more elaborate sensors.