Re-Routing Costs Evaluation for the Inflight Drone

A drone would take some waiting time to change its own flight route to the new route called re-routing time. To control the drone with the best flight plan, we have to estimate some re-route costs when the drone wants to change the course and direction according to the updated waypoint flight plan. In this work, we designed and implemented a flight monitoring program in the existing drone mission control app to measure the re-routing costs for various re-routing cases, and established the re-routing cost estimation method for the inflight drone that can expect the re-route costs. The inflight re-route cost includes the time and distance to change the preset route into a new route according to the drone flight speed and direction by waypoint in the middle of the drone flight. To measure the costs of the inflight drone re-routing method, we modified the waypoint flight planning module in the drone mission control app. The modified mission control app transmits the new waypoint data and receives the drone flight information with several flight data through the link communication. We tried many cases of the inflight re-routing with waypoint mission control under the various drone speeds and new waypoint directions and collected the flight factors through the flight monitoring program checks the costs for the inflight drone re-routing process. The experimental results show that total re-routing time and total re-routing flight distance have some kind of linear relations with the re-routing direction and flight speed at all. The experimental results also showed that the re-route cost can be estimated from the linear function relation with the new waypoint direction and the flight speed.