GuideSwarm: A Drone Network Design to Assist Visually Impaired People

Today, most of the metropolitan areas lack necessary infrastructure to guide visually impaired people. Even with an existing infrastructure, it is nearly impossible to ensure the safety of visually impaired people in dense/crowded urban areas. In this paper, we propose aerial swarm framework, namely GuideSwarm, cooperatively utilizing multiple drones to provide assistance to visually impaired people in crowded urban environments. In this manner, GuideSwarm first formally structures allocation and scheduling problems by defining different sets of assistance missions. Then, we form an optimization problem with the objective of minimizing average waiting time for the users and propose a heuristic method solving the defined optimization in O(n² ) time complexity. Compared to the greedy approaches, our solution provides 19% less waiting time for users demanding assistance.