Multi-Purpose Drones for Coverage and Transport Applications

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become important in many applications including last-mile deliveries, surveillance and monitoring, and wireless networks. This paper aims to design UAV trajectories that simultaneously perform multiple tasks. We aim to design UAV trajectories that efficiently perform some transportation operation (e.g., package delivery), and at the same time provide uniform coverage over a neighborhood area which is needed for applications such as network coverage, Internet of Things (IoT) devices data collection, wireless power transfer, and surveillance. We first consider multi-task UAVs for a simplified scenario where the neighborhood area is a circular region where UAV missions start from the center and the destinations are assumed to be uniformly distributed on the circle boundary. We propose a trajectory process such that if according to which the UAV's move, a uniform coverage can be achieved while the transport (delivery) efficiency is still preserved. We then consider a more practical scenario in which the transport destinations are arbitrarily distributed in an arbitrarily-shaped region. We show that simultaneous uniform coverage and efficient transport trajectory (e.g. package delivery) is possible for such realistic scenarios. This is shown using both rigorous analysis as well as simulations.