Extending the Range of Drone-based Delivery Services by Exploration
This paper tackles the problem of limited drone delivery range for drone service providers, offering an incremental improvement to path planning and energy optimization.
This paper addresses the limited range of drones by proposing an adaptive exploration technique that leverages physical structures like buildings and trees to extend their delivery service coverage. The method generates paths for drones to reach destinations while learning about energy consumption on each path edge to optimize future missions. The authors found that exploring locations near the boundary of currently reachable sets can speed up the learning process.
Drones have a fairly short range due to their limited battery life. We propose an adaptive exploration techniques to extend the range of drones by taking advantage of physical structures such as tall buildings and trees in urban environments. Our goal is to extend the coverage of a drone delivery service by generating paths for a drone to reach its destination while learning about the energy consumption on each edge on its path in order to optimize its range for future missions. We evaluated the performance of our exploration strategy in finding the set of all reachable destinations in a city, and found that exploring locations near the boundary of the reachable sets according to the current energy model can speed up the learning process.