Minimum Energy Trajectories for Local Area Networks of Drones in the Presence of Obstacles

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) networks can be used to perform tasks more efficiently in various industrial applications. A Local Area Network of Drones (LoD) is such a network, which can be utilized to perform tasks with the least number of UAVs. The air space of most industrial applications consists of obstacles, which constraint UAV movements and block line of sight communication. Therefore, LoDs should be able to plan their trajectories avoiding these obstacles. In this paper, we propose a simple approach to determine energy-optimized trajectories of a LoD in the presence of obstacles. Our method minimizes the total energy consumption of all UAVs while avoiding any collisions with the obstacles and any obstructions to the line of sight communication. Additionally, we present a method to determine the energy-minimized target sequence when the UAVs have to travel to multiple target locations to perform a set of given tasks.