UAV Swarm for Desert Flight

Robots and specialized drones can perform unique tasks in various environments, each presenting its own challenges. When deploying UAVs in challenging harsh environments, such as forests or deserts, it is often necessary to modify or enhance the technology.

Contrary to indoor spaces or even outdoor settings, like parking lots or fields, wild forests and deserts can be challenging to navigate. Several methods relying on the underlying structure of an environment, such as level ground or distinct features for vision-based systems, tend to fail.

Fly4Future designed a custom drone specifically for the Technology Innovation Institute in Abu Dhabi (TII) to perform multi-UAV missions in harsh environments. The onboard sensors and open-source autonomy engine enabled the UAVs to perform several different tasks in the desert.

Simultaneously deploying a large number of UAVs in the desert required a crucial emphasis on creating a compact design. The team at TII tested their algorithms with a swarm as large as 20 UAVs flying in a compact group over the desert.

The Fly4Future UAV swarm has applications in several different areas:

• Performing critical tasks, like search-and-rescue
• Monitoring plant and animal life can be extremely challenging for humans in a harsh environment
• Coverage of large areas with better accuracy
• Assistance to human monitors in searches or long-term monitoring of an environment
• Track and transform desert wildlife over time