Path planning of unmanned aerial vehicles with terrestrial wireless network tracking

The UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) market is projected to grow, sustained by the technological progress in different domains related to UAVs and by the emergence of new civilian applications. However, this economical development might be held back due to increased regulation constraints. A major concern of public authorities is to ensure a safe sharing of the airspace, especially over populated areas. To reach this aim, a fundamental mechanism is to provide a permanent tracking of UAVs. In this paper, we investigate the path planning of autonomous UAVs with tracking capabilities provided by terrestrial wireless networks. We formalize this problem as a constrained shortest path problem, where the objective is to minimize the delay for reaching a destination, while ensuring a certain delivery ratio of messages reporting the drone's positions.