Coordination and communication of cooperative parafoils for humanitarian aid

In the case of a wide-scale disaster, an accurate airdrop of emergency supplies is crucial. We present a novel, top-down approach for designing and executing airdrop missions using guided parafoils. We develop a guidance algorithm and a cooperative task management method for the autonomous handling of faults and exceptional events by the parafoil group. The autonomous operation is based on inter-parafoil ad-hoc communication. A parafoil or a number of parafoils can dynamically react to events that prevent one or more parafoils from successfully completing their mission. Two recovery methods are presented: Swap, which enables parafoils to dynamically exchange their targets, and Replace, which gives precedence to prioritized targets over low-priority targets. The parafoil guidance method, combined with the task management algorithm, significantly increases the probability of successful airdrop. The small overhead of the communication layer and of the low complexity of the swap and replace recovery algorithms enable these procedures to run in a distributed environment under real-time limitations.