GNSS-aware path planning for UAV swarm in complex environments

This paper aims at defining a planning strategy for routing a swarm of UAVs in an environment with mixed GNSS coverage, i.e., which includes both open sky areas and challenging zones with unavailable and/or unreliable satellite coverage. UAVs follow in an independent way their path in open areas, while cooperative strategies are adopted in the challenging ones. Cooperation consists in enhancing navigation performance of the platform in the challenging area by using another UAV that flies under nominal GNSS coverage and is always in visual line of sight (LOS) with the first. Satellite coverage is estimated with a multi-GNSS constellation approach and challenging areas are defined by setting a threshold for the Dilution of Precision. Results, obtained in simulation on a real-world scenario, show an effective solution that can be used both offline and in near real time.