Implementation of Ground Control System for Autonomous Multi-agents using QGroundControl

This paper presents an integration approach to deploy new mission planning methods for multi-vehicle systems within an open source ground control system (GCS), i.e. QGroundControl. As the autonomous mission planning features of QGroundControl consist in pre-planning waypoints within a geofence, there is no way to deal with scenarios where the agents of the swarm must counter moving targets of reduced size, or more generally any scenario where an algorithm of path planning is preferred instead of a manual planification. The proposed solution consists in extending the toolbox of the application (QGCToolbox) with a new tool (QGCTool), in implementing a new controller and modifying views (Flight-DisplayViewMap, PlanView) while enabling information to flow between components using Qt's signals and slots. A test scenario is presented to verify new mission planning interface and path planning algorithm, that involves in this case eight UAVs operating in a zone to protect and an area to attack. Also a workaround is proposed to increase the default limitation of connections to QGroundControl. The proposed methodology is tested and validated with software in the loop and flight test.