Using Machine Learning to Take Stay-or-Go Decisions in Data-driven Drone Missions
This addresses efficiency issues for drone operators in time-sensitive data collection missions, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods like regression-based approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of drones deciding whether to stay or go during data-driven missions to avoid wasted waiting or costly fly-backs, and results show that proposed machine-learning methods improve worst-case mission time by up to 4.1x and keep median mission time within 2.7% of an ideal method.
Drones are becoming indispensable in many application domains. In data-driven missions, besides sensing, the drone must process the collected data at runtime to decide whether additional action must be taken on the spot, before moving to the next point of interest. If processing does not reveal an event or situation that requires such an action, the drone has waited in vain instead of moving to the next point. If, however, the drone starts moving to the next point and it turns out that a follow-up action is needed at the previous point, it must spend time to fly-back. To take this decision, we propose different machine-learning methods based on branch prediction and reinforcement learning. We evaluate these methods for a wide range of scenarios where the probability of event occurrence changes with time. Our results show that the proposed methods consistently outperform the regression-based method proposed in the literature and can significantly improve the worst-case mission time by up to 4.1x. Also, the achieved median mission time is very close, merely up to 2.7% higher, to that of a method with perfect knowledge of the current underlying event probability at each point of interest.