Simulation of Collaborating Autonomous Gliders

Abstract: Drones today have a wide field of application, for example monitoring vast areas and pollination of fruit trees in Japan. Even though drones can do many different types of services today, they are still limited to power usage which results in that drones are not able to stay aloft for a very long time. To be able to improve the flight time an alternative could be to replace drone technology with autonomously gliders, since gliders do not require engines to stay aloft. Instead of external power, gliders use air currents, such as columns of rising hot air know as thermals. Even if gliders would be a great alternative to drones in the future, gliders still cannot detect a thermal before it has entered it and therefore limiting its ability to stay aloft. The purpose for this thesis was to increase the gliders’ possibility of detecting thermals and use thermals by increasing the numbers of gliders in the air and then let them collaborate. In this thesis we tried to figure out a way for the gliders to collaborate and then verified its positive effect. To be able to analyze the planes’ flight path, we used a simulation including a simple world, gliders, thermals, and a hard to reach global target for the gliders. When we had implemented five rules to increase the planes’ possibility to collaborate, we ran the simulation 10 000 times to be able to understand how the rules had changed the flights of the gliders. The result from the simulation was put into graphs that later was analyzed. The simulations without the collaboration rules showed that less than half a percent of the simulations ended with at least one glider reaching the global target. While the simulations with the collaboration rules resulted in a rise to over nine percent of the simulation sending with a glider or gliders that reached the global target. However, it was almost six percent of all simulations with rules that resulted in that all five planes reached the target. This resulted in that the collaboration between the planes, to be able to find thermals and use them, increased the flight time and the possibility for the planes to reach the global target.