Drone Trajectory Control for Line-of-Sight Optical Camera Communication

Optical Camera Communication (OCC) is a promising solution for long-range point-to-multipoint communication between drones and a ground camera. OCC requires line-of-sight (LoS) channels for a camera to receive optical signals transmitted from drone-mounted LED lights or panels. When multiple drones are deployed in a certain area to transmit optical signals simultaneously, inter-light interference avoidance is a significant issue. The inter-light interference has been modeled in the previous works. However, existing works have not sufficiently investigated the trajectory control of drones. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a distributed trajectory control algorithm for drones to avoid inter-light interference. Based on the approximate interference model in the image plane, each drone controls its trajectory to ensure LoS communication links of other drones. The performance of the proposed algorithm is confirmed via intense multi-agent simulation. The proposed algorithm contributes to establishing stable point-to-multipoint OCC links between drones and a ground camera.