  Drones are also known as UAVs are originally designed for military purposes.
With the technological advances, they can be seen in most of the aspects of
life from filming to logistics. The increased use of drones made it sometimes
essential to form a collaboration between them to perform the task efficiently
in a defined process. This paper investigates the use of a combined centralised
and decentralised architecture for the collaborative operation of drones in a
parts delivery scenario to enable and expedite the operation of the factories
of the future. The centralised and decentralised approaches were extensively
researched, with experimentation being undertaken to determine the
appropriateness of each approach for this use-case. Decentralised control was
utilised to remove the need for excessive communication during the operation of
the drones, resulting in smoother operations. Initial results suggested that
the decentralised approach is more appropriate for this use-case. The
individual functionalities necessary for the implementation of a decentralised
architecture were proven and assessed, determining that a combination of
multiple individual functionalities, namely VSLAM, dynamic collision avoidance
and object tracking, would give an appropriate solution for use in an
industrial setting. A final architecture for the parts delivery system was
proposed for future work, using a combined centralised and decentralised
approach to combat the limitations inherent in each architecture.
