Students at Imperial College London have developed a proof-of-concept based on the behaviour of magnets, which could be used as traffic management system for drones. The team ran the project on Microsoft's Azure cloud platform, and worked with drone traffic management pioneers Altitude Angel to create a system in which multiple drones were repelled if they came too close to one another, enabling them to fly freely in a confined space without human intervention. In their paper published today in Nature Communications, the researchers describe how they built an algorithm that can detect when two or more drones are approaching each other within a certain distance from each other.
Students at Imperial College London have developed a proof-of-concept based on the behaviour of magnets, which could be used as traffic management system for drones. The team ran the project on Microsoft's Azure cloud platform, and worked with drone traffic management pioneers Altitude Angel to create a system in which multiple drones were repelled if they came too close to one another, enabling them to fly freely in a confined space without human intervention. Lawrence Gripper, Altitude Angel’s head of product, said the company was already investigating further development of the system.