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Cooperative trajectory planning in an intercommunicating group of UAVs for

convex plume wrapping

Conference Paper · September 2017

DOI: 10.1109/SARNOF.2017.8080382

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 2017 IEEE 38th Sarnoff Symposium

Cooperative Trajectory Planning in an

Intercommunicating Group of UAVs for Convex
Plume Wrapping
Angelyn Arputha Babu John, Ph.D. Student, North Carolina State University, Dr. Rudra Dutta, Associate
Professor, North Carolina State University,

Abstract—Trajectory planning in airborne networks is a primary application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) communication. The
literature contains algorithms focusing on collision avoidance, intelligent task assignment and path planning among UAVs. Cooperative
schemes exist in which the UAVs communicate with each other to reach a consensus on how each vehicle will take up one trajectory at
a time efficiently based on its capability. In the last decade, much research is being done to use UAVs to track contamination in the
environment, detect fires and even volcanic eruptions. As the plumes are constantly varying in space and time, there have to be
efficient guidance algorithms for the UAVs in order to keep track of the shape of the plume. In this paper, we survey the literature to
explore the currently available trajectory planning algorithms and also the few available plume tracking algorithms. We then formulate
the Plume wrapping problem and propose a cooperative trajectory planning approach for a group of UAVs, through which the UAVs
communicate their position estimates and planned trajectories to update each others trajectory to efficiently wrap around a plume
region so that the contamination in the region can be studied.

Index Terms—UAV, trajectory planning, plume wrapping, multi-UAV communication.

F
1 I NTRODUCTION

U NMANNED Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have attracted an

increased interest in many robotic applications. UAVs
have higher mobility and maneuverability than ground
vehicles, making them the natural way to get information
or even to perform some actions such as deployment of
instrumentation. They are a good approach to perform
certain tasks like data and image acquisition of targets and
areas inaccessible to ground access, localization of targets,
tracking, map building and others. One such upcoming
application is plume tracking [1]. Plume tracking is the term
used for the systems response teams use to plot the course
of a hazardous airborne material such as a gas or toxic
chemical plume in the worst case scenario of a leak.
Various approaches for tracking the plume and its
source localization are well studied in robotics and artificial
intelligence field. Cooperative small unmanned aerial vehi-
cles equipped with the required chemical sensors provides
a promising option for safe and cost-effective data collection
[2]. The concentration of a plume changes as it moves away
from the source and mixes with the clean air. The problem
with using a one-time detection of a plume using a static
sensor, a single UAV or even a swarm of UAVs is that the
complete nature of the plume cannot be obtained at that
instant. There is a need to track the shape and characteristics
of the plume as it moves along the dynamic environment.
An autonomous group of UAVs can be seen as an attractive
• A. Babu John is a student at the Department of Computer Science, North
Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, 27606.
E-mail: ababujo@ncsu.edu
• Dr. Rudra Dutta is an associate professor at the Department of Computer
Science, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, 27606.
E-mail: dutta@csc.ncsu.edu
option to track these plume characteristics, if they can wrap
the plume and move along with it.
Regardless of the number of UAVs employed in any
application, it is highly important to position them in or-
der to gain useful information from their locations. In the
broader context of the problem, the guidance algorithm
requirements include making the UAVs autonomous, coop-
erate with each other, avoid static and dynamic obstacles in
their path, and result in efficient trajectories for all the UAVs
as a group. In this study, we focus on a specific part of the
problem. We will present a cooperative trajectory planning
algorithm for a group of UAVs that can efficiently detect the
position and spread of a plume of chemical contamination
in the atmosphere. Our algorithm can be extended to im-
prove the efficiency of the trajectories, the completeness of
the enclosure, and the effectiveness of tracking the plume;
however, these are beyond the scope of our current unit of
work, which was focused on creating an initial cooperative
algorithm based on UAVs passing messages to each other to
effect initial detection and enclosure. In the next section, we
review the motivation for our problem
2 M OTIVATION
The trajectory planning approach can be divided into classi-
cal methods and heuristic methods. Traditional or classical
methods include dynamic programming, optimal control
theory, cell decomposition, road map and potential fields
[3] etc., while the heuristic methods include Neural Net-
works (NN) approach, Principal Component Analysis (PCA)
and MultiLayer perception (MLP) [4], which uses multi-
layer neural network. Other nature Inspired Algorithms like
Genetic Algorithm (GA) [5], an optimization tool based on

978-1-5386-3019-8/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE

 2017 IEEE 38th Sarnoff Symposium
natural genetics and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO)
[6], a stochastic optimization technique which finds the
global optimum by changing the collection of particles in
the search area towards a promising area.
In the recent years there has been a need to use mul-
tiple UAVs as they give fault tolerance and increased flexi-
bility. Two strategies for trajectory planning in multi-agent
systems are the centralized or decentralized or distributed
approaches. Although the centralized approaches have been
used in different studies like MILP and NLP technologies
[7], their computation times scales exponentially with the
number of vehicles. If the central controller or leader fails,
the entire system falls apart. This one-point failure and
communication requirements makes distributed approaches
a better solution.
There have been considerable research in the last
decade to track plumes back to its source and also take
measurements from hazardous environments. The Volcan
Project [8] built an autonomous aerial system, that was
able to perform aerial surveillance of volcanic areas and to
analyze the composition of gases inside the volcanic fumes.
Merino et. al [9] implements a multi-UAV cooperative per-
ception system to measure forest fires. But these approaches
were limited to a single UAV and is controlled by a ground
station. Other significant plume tracking algorithms by
cooperative UAVs include Marjovi et. al [10], which was
used to track an odor plume. Each UAV is equipped with
an attractive beacon that will turn on when a chemical is
detected. This beacon is then used to attract the other UAVs
to that area. The innovative algorithm gives a great guidance
scheme for the UAVs, but this can be still optimized both in
the sensing and enclosure phase. And both algorithms are
limited to 2D scenarios.
While these approaches represent good solutions from
the trajectory planning perspective, they do not incorporate
consideration of the distributed nature of the computational
requirements that would be needed in practice to realize
such algorithms. Our contribution, presented in the next
section, is to consider the problem as a computing prob-
lem, and to proposed an approach in which the required
computation is done by the UAVs themselves, acting as
autonomous computing agents, mediated by the actual
passing of messages between UAVs, and obviating the need
for a back-end computing cloud or ground control station,
which also eliminates the delay of communications to and
from the ground control station.
3 P ROBLEM S TATEMENT
The plume wrapping problem can be formally framed as
follows: ‘A group of UAVs is said to have wrapped a plume
if every UAV has positioned itself at or close to a point on the
boundary of the plume, and the surface (subset of the plume
boundary) covered by the UAVs has comparable span in any two
orthogonal directions on that surface, and the density of UAVs is
roughly equal over this surface. Further, if this surface becomes a
closed surface that covers the entire boundary of the plume, the
group of UAVs is said to have enclosed the plume.’
The UAVs are not aware of the presence of a plume, and
also they are unaware of the shape and extent of the
contamination. When a plume is discovered, the UAVs in
the swarm have to efficiently wrap around the plume to
give its location and possibly move along with it, while also
maintaining safe distance from each other.
In our initial work to solve the problem of plume
wrapping, we make several simplifying assumptions we
intend to relax in subsequent work. The plume is considered
to be in the shape of a convex hull. In our problem, we
assume the plume to be spherical, a simple convex hull.
The degree of contamination falls off as a curve, with the
maximum density at the center. All the UAVs are equipped
with a sensor that has the ability to sense the contamination
after its density becomes greater than a certain threshold.
The size of the plume is assumed to be comparatively large
to be able to be detected by the UAV. The location of each
UAV is known at all times in an absolute 3D space. All the
UAVs start from the same location, say from the corner of
the volume. Each can communicate information to all the
other UAVs in the volume, that is , all UAVs are within
the broadcasting range. There is no back-end controller that
instructs the UAVs. Thus, any information that is to be sent
between the UAVs must be in the form of messages passed
between them.
3.1 Proposed Solution
Generally all existing work related to swarm intelligence
were derived from the group or social behavior in animals
and insects [11]. Based on local communication between
swarm members and the actions that they do an individual
evaluates and later generate appropriate behavior that will
contribute to the groups objective. With this decentralized
approach, most of the communication overheads, which
are characteristics of centralized systems, are saved and
the hardware can be fairly simple. Through redundancy, a
properly designed system can achieve reliability.
3.1.1 Aggregation and Flight Formation
The type of formation to be used is highly important in our
problem, as it decides the efficiency with which the swarm
can survey the area, avoid obstacles and collisions, detect
the contamination and successfully wrap around the plume.
We propose that the UAVs come into a mesh formation
before it can survey the region.
Marjovi et. al [12] formulated the best spatial formation
by a swarm of UAVs equipped with gas sensors to sense
to olfactory targets. The study compared three different
configurations of sensors in the environment. The mesh
configuration is shown to give the longest sensor coverage.
Therefore, in our implementation we not only navigate to-
wards the plume but also establish a spatial mesh topology
and maintain its cohesion.
3.1.2 Plume Wrapping
In our stated problem, the aim of the swarm is to wrap the
plume. So, the swarm should be able to reconfigure itself
when it detects a contamination. The UAVs in the mesh
perform a sweep of the region to find any contamination.
Our implementation assumes that the mesh is sweeping
through the area in a direction perpendicular to the mesh,
thus covering more region in space. One way to reconfigure
 2017 IEEE 38th Sarnoff Symposium
UAVs at random locations in the region would be to arrange
them in a mesh according to their hardware addressed.
Once any, some or all UAVs in the mesh detect the
plume, they stop at the boundary and pull the other UAVs
that have not detected the plume yet. The UAVs at the
plume boundary enforce a virtual force on the UAVs away
from then making the whole plane mesh fold onto a convex
hulls boundary (sphere in this case). In our implementation,
there should be a repulsive force also in place to push away
the UAVs that are getting too close to each while wrapping
around this convex hull. We explain the algorithm in detail
in the next section, including all the forces in play.
4 P LUME W RAPPING A LGORITHM
Below we define some notations used in this section by
U AVi :
• N : number of UAVs in the mesh
• Sep : minimum separation between any two UAVs in
the swarm (in meters).
• (pxi , pyi , pzi ): Position of the UAV in NED coordi-
nates (in meters)
• (phii , thetai , psii ): angles in ZYX convention (in ra-
dians)
• (ui , vi , wi ): velocity along the coordinates (m/s)
• (pi , qi , ri ) : rotational velocity of coordinates (rad/s)
• (pxi , pyi , pzi , phii , thetai , psii , ui , vi , wi , pi , qi , ri ):
Present state of U AVi in the state space
4.1 Aggregation and Flight Formation
The aggregation and flight formation is more of a initial-
ization for our other algorithms that follow. A swarm of N
UAVs are assumed to be in a mesh formation to begin with.
Each UAV knows the location and position of other UAVs
in the mesh. The messages from one UAV can be identified
by a certain numbering scheme. This scheme is known to all
the UAVs in the mesh.
4.2 Plume Wrapping
The UAVs are now moving in a plane mesh perpendicular to
the plane. Each UAV can detect the plume when it (sensor)
comes in contact with the contamination. So the mesh has
to intersect the plume in some way in order to detect the
contamination. In our problem statement, we assumed the
shape of the plume to be a convex hull. There are three
possible ways a plane can intersect a convex plume.
1) Whole mesh intersect: Given the orientation of the
mesh and the plume similar to the one in the figure
FIG. 1a, the whole mesh falls directly onto the
plume.
2) Single point of intersection: Consider an infinitely
long mesh moving towards a sphere in any direc-
tion. As shown in the figure FIG. 1b, just one UAV
comes in contact with the plume initially.
3) More than one point of contact: As shown in FIG.1c,
many UAVs might intersect the hull at the same
time and come to a halt. Another sub-case of this
would be FIG. 1d. In this scenario, the mesh has
moved into the convex plume a bit before stopping,
due to inertia. At this time, almost 2 other UAVs also
come in contact with the plume.
When one of the UAVs come in contact with a plume, it
informs the other UAVs in the mesh. Each UAV knows how
far it is from the UAV that detected the plume, by number
of hops. The UAV that found the contamination should try
and pull the other UAVs close to it, where the plume resides.
Based on the relative position and current heading of the
UAVs, its trajectory can be formulated to maneuver them
towards the plume.
The time is assumed to be discrete and each time step last
some ct seconds (0.02 seconds in our simulation). Let Xi (t)
be the state of U AVi at time step t. The plume wrapping
protocol is therefore a rule f such that for every U AVi
f (Xi (t), N eighborhood(Xi (t))) ∈ D
where N eighborhood(Xi (t)) is the states received by U AVi
from all the UAVs around it.
D = {‘left‘, ‘right‘, ‘up‘, ‘down‘,‘up-left‘,‘up-right‘,‘down-
left‘,‘down-right‘}
When a UAV detects a plume, its comes to a stop.
Since the other UAVs did not detect this plume, they would
tend to move along their initial trajectory. So the detected
UAV exerts a virtual force on the other UAV, pulling them
towards it in order to maintain the mesh, at the same time
maintaining the safety distance between the UAVs. This
resultant force in turn brings all the UAVs in the mesh to
aggregate around the plume. To implement this, the virtual
forces experienced by U AVi due to a push or pull of another
U AVj is defined as follows
Fijco (t) α P~ji (t)
and
Fijco (t) = pull towards phisense if|P~ji (t)| < dmin (1)
=0 if dmin ≤ |P~ji (t)| ≤ dmax (2)
= push along phisense ~
if|Pji (t)| > dmax (3)
Where a1 and a2 are two positive coefficients. P~ji (t) =
Pj (t) − Pi (t). dmax and dmin define the distance margin
between any two neighbouring UAVs such that 0 <Sep
<dmin <dmax and dmax is twice that of dmin . phisense
defines the angle between the current heading angle and
the location of the message source from U AVi .
The equation of the force formulated above gives the
amount of change in the angular velocity that is to be
enforced to the current orientation of the UAV. When U AVi
receives ‘Plume detected’ message from multiple sources, it
breaks the tie in one of two ways:
1) Distance from each of the message source: This is the
first step to break ties between two sources. U AVi
chooses to respond to the force from the nearest
message source(least number of hops).
2) Instance of Plume detection: If the message sources are
at the same distance from U AVi , the time stamps at-
tached with the detection messages are considered,
and U AVi responds to the the lower time stamp,
that is, the UAV that detected the plume first.
 2017 IEEE 38th Sarnoff Symposium

Fig. 1: a: A case in which all the points of the mesh intersect the convex hull. b: Single point of contacts of infinite meshes
on a sphere. c: more than one point of contact on the plume. d: Sharp convex cases: UAV goes in the plume due to inertia

Plume wrapping algorithm gives the procedure followed 32: else

by each UAV in the swarm to enclose the plume. {U AVi is at equal distance from both the
message sources}
{Plume Wrapping Algorithm: Implemented on U AVi 33: Check time stamps of ‘Plume detected’
in the mesh} message from the message sources
1: a1 ← 0.4 {Coefficient for repulsive force} 34: Choose message source with least time
2: a2 ← 0.8 {Coefficient for attractive force} stamp
3: if U AVi comes in contact with plume then 35: end if
{Check completion of mission} 36: end if
4: Halt and station keep 37: end if
5: Broadcast ‘Plume Detected’ message 38: phisense ← direction heading towards the
6: else message source selected
7: U AVi moves in the straight path perpendicular to 39: D ← distance to the message source
itself 40: if D < Sep then
8: Wait (0.2s) {Fpush experienced as U AVi is too close to
{Wait for 1 time step for possible broadcast messages the message source}
about plume} 41: [pi (t), qi (t), ri (t)] = [pi (t−1), qi (t−1), ri (t−
9: if no message was received then 1)] ∗ H
10: go to 3 {Change velocity to reflect the force - de-
11: else pends on number of hops U AVi away from
12: if U AVi received ‘Plume Detected’ message then the detected UAV}
13: if the message is received from more than one 42: (phii (t), thetai (t), psii (t)) ← (−phisense )
source then {Change the direction of U AVi int he direc-
{Synchronization steps} tion of the force}
14: Hj and Hk gets number of hops from the 43: else
message sources U AVj and U AVk 44: if D < 2*Sep then
{extended to cases with more than two UAVs - 45: [pi , qi , ri ] = [pi , qi , ri ]
j , k as well} 46: (phii , thetai , psii ) ← (phii , thetai , psii )
15: if Hj < Hk then {Continue to move with the same heading
16: U AVi responds to the f orce f romU AVj and velocity}
17: H ← Hj {Least number of hops} 47: else
18: else {Fpush experienced as U AVi is moving
19: if Hj < Hk then too far from the initial mesh configuration.
20: U AVi responds to the f orce f romU AVj It is forced to change its orientation and
21: H ← Hj velocity to joint the mesh}
22: else 48: [pi (t), qi (t), ri (t)] = [pi (t − 1), qi (t −
{ U AVi is at equal distance from both the 1), ri (t − 1)] ∗ H
message sources} 49: (phii (t), thetai (t), psii (t)) ← phisense
23: Check time stamps of ‘Plume detected’ {Change the direction of U AVi int he di-
message from the message sources rection of the force}
24: Choose message source with least time 50: end if
stamp 51: end if
25: end if 52: end if
26: if Hj < Hk then 53: W ait(0.2s)
27: U AVi responds to the f orce f romU AVj {for possible broadcast messages on plume up-
28: H ← Hj dates}
29: if Hj < Hk then 54: go to 3
30: U AVi responds to the f orce f romU AVj 55: end if
31: H ← Hj
 2017 IEEE 38th Sarnoff Symposium
5 S IMULATION
5.1 Simulation Environment
We implemented our algorithm in a multi-vehicle
simulator (QRSim) [13], which is an open source
software developed at University College, London
(UCL) to device and test algorithms for their flock
autonomous helicopters. The algorithms was run in a
PC with a 1.4GHz Dual Core processor and 4GB of
RAM. The operating system used was Mac OS. The
code was written and compiled in MATLAB.
Fig. 2: Guidance, Navigation and control (GNC) of the UAV
as in the simulator
Our implementation uses one of the manually
designed PID controllers in the simulator, VelocityPID
controller, that computes the pitch, roll and throttle in-
puts necessary to maintain a desired angular velocity
while maintaining a specified heading in sequence to
step forward in the simulation. The overall Guidance
Navigation and Control of the simulator are depicted
in FIG. 2.
5.2 Simulation Results
This section provides the details of our implemen-
tation of Plume enclosure algorithm. We present the
results of the implementation in the QRSim multi-
vehicle simulator.
5.2.1 Plume Wrapping
This section covers our implementation of the plume
wrapping algorithm. The 9 UAVs are arranged in a
mesh initially, with a distance of atleast twice the min-
imum separation between the UAVs. We experiment
with the possible cases of a plane intersection with a
sphere to see the performance of our algorithm using
the simulator.
• The whole plane intersection To visualize this
case, we used a very large sphere to represent
the plume as a convex hull as in FIG. 3a.
The plane mesh of UAVs is seen moving to-
wards the plume in a direction perpendicular
to themselves (along x-axis).As the plume is
very big, most of the UAVs in the mesh come
in contact with the plume at almost the same
time. So the other UAVs receive the ’Plume
received’ message, from all these UAVs that
came in contact with the contamination at the
same instant. The few UAVs left hanging in the
mesh are now pulled towards the plume to be
wrapped around.
• Single point of intersection
To implement this scenario, we used a smaller
plume as in FIG. 4a, that only one corner UAV
could sense the contamination as the mesh
searches the region for the plume. As the mesh
closes into the region of contamination, only
one UAV, shown in red in FIG.4b comes in con-
tact with it. As we see in FIG.4c, all the UAVs
are pulled together to be wrapped around the
convex plume. The trajectory followed by the
UAVs are not a smooth curve as seen in the
Figure. This explains the pushing forces from
the neighboring UAVs when they get too close
to each other.
• Multiple points of intersection
FIG. 5a depicts the initial positions of the
plume and the plane mesh. At this stage, two
UAVs come in contact with the convex hull at
almost the same time.The UAVs that reach the
plume at the same time are shown in red in
FIG. 5b. In the final stages of the simulation,
the mesh is seen to wrap around the plume
as in FIG. 5c, effectively avoiding collisions
with each other in the swarm. The algorithm is
proved to work efficiently with all the cases of
intersections of the mesh with a convex plume.
6 C ONCLUSION
In this paper we reviewed some of the existing
trajectory planning algorithms and plume tracking
techniques.We then proposed a cooperative trajec-
tory planning algorithm for UAVs to effectively wrap
around a convex plume. Previous approaches to en-
close a plume were proposed for 2D environment,
while our algorithm manages to wrap around the
plume in 3D. We implemented our algorithm in the
simulator and studied the results. Simulation results
show that the UAVs effectively wrap around the
plume, at all possible points of contact. As part of our
ongoing work, we are planning to add a the mesh for-
mation algorithm to form the initial configuration of
the plane mesh, which precedes the plume wrapping.
Future work will also include implementing the algo-
rithms in a real environment, where the obstacles are
taken into account as well as the models of the sensors
and communication latency. Finally, we would also
like to design and study an algorithm that can avoid
obstacles in the path, while maintaining this mesh and
detecting the plume along the way.
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 2017 IEEE 38th Sarnoff Symposium

Fig. 3: a: Plane mesh of 9 nodes moving towards a large convex plume. b:After the plane intersects the large plume

Fig. 4: a: Initial location of the mesh and the convex plume, b:Single point of contact shown in red, c:The mesh seen
wrapping around the plume from the single point of contact

Fig. 5: a: Initial locations of the mesh and the convex plume, b: Two points of intersection shown in red, c: The mesh seen
wrapping around the plume

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