Holistic Path Planning for Multi-Drone Data Collection

This paper presents how to plan for and deploy a team of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to collect data from wireless sensors while minimizing collection latency. We propose a holistic solution for this problem where we first form an offline plan while considering communication and energy constraints then derive an online strategy for the UAVs to handle sensor failures and the stochastic nature of wireless communication. For offline planning, we propose a heuristic-based algorithm that turns the problem into a variation of the Vehicle Routing Problem. For our online strategy, we propose a coupled offline-online algorithm that adapts UAV behavior as needed. We evaluate our algorithms through extensive simulations as well as a proof-of-concept implementation on a physical UAV and wireless sensor testbed.