Stag hunt game-based approach for cooperative UAVs

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are being employed in many areas such as photography, emergency, entertainment, defence, agriculture, forestry, mining and construction. Over the last decade, UAV technology has found applications in nu-merous construction project phases, ranging from site map-ping, progress monitoring, building inspection, damage as-sessments, and material delivery. While extensive studies have been conducted on the advantages of UAVs for various construction-related processes, studies on UAV collaboration to improve the task capacity and eÿciency are still scarce. This paper proposes a new cooperative path planning algorithm for multiple UAVs based on the stag hunt game and particle swarm optimization (PSO). First, a cost function for each UAV is defined, incorporating multiple objectives and constraints. The UAV game framework is then developed to formulate the multi-UAV path planning into the problem of finding payoff-dominant equilibrium. Next, a PSO-based algorithm is proposed to obtain optimal paths for the UAVs. Simulation results for a large construction site inspected by three UAVs indicate the effectiveness of the proposed algo-rithm in generating feasible and eÿcient flight paths for UAV formation during the inspection task.