Autonomous Multi-Drone Mission Planning

During the second half of my PhD research, I became increasingly fascinated with multi-agent drone applications, especially for public safety. Coincidentally, I had also long aspired to start my own company. Thus, while still in the midst of my PhD research, I founded a startup to develop multi-drone mission planning solutions for public safety applications. This startup would eventually become Multi AI.

In the early conception stages of Multi AI (2022), we focused on developing autonomous mission planning algorithms to help users quickly field multiple drones at once. Some of our efforts also included the exploration of these algorithms for larger uncrewed systems working in unison with crewed aircraft. Without being able to go into too much detail, the following videos and this press release give a high-level idea.

The first video shows how our solution commands three Tello drones to execute a flipping command based on a simple voice command from a user.

The second video shows a loyal wingman simulation, where our solution autonomously plans waypoint missions for four uncrewed aircraft that escort a crewed aircraft. Our solution processes high-level mission objectives from the user and then computes waypoint and command primitives that the drones execute.

Though our multi-drone mission planning solution enjoyed considerable success early on, we noticed that the challenging FAA regulatory landscape and the high cost of deploying multiple drones at once made it difficult to scale our solution. Thus, in 2023, we began applying our multi-agent deployment knowledge for drone applications to more general fleet coordination and planning applications in the military, which ultimately led to Multi-Agent Decision-Support in Adversarial Environments.