Extending the Range of Drone-based Delivery Services by Exploration

TL;DR

This paper introduces an adaptive exploration method that leverages urban physical structures to extend drone delivery range by learning energy consumption patterns and optimizing path planning.

Contribution

It presents a novel exploration technique that uses environmental features to improve drone range and delivery coverage in urban settings.

Findings

Exploring boundary locations accelerates learning of energy consumption.

The method effectively identifies all reachable destinations in a city.

Adaptive exploration improves drone delivery efficiency.

Abstract

Drones have a fairly short range due to their limited battery life. We propose an adaptive exploration techniques to extend the range of drones by taking advantage of physical structures such as tall buildings and trees in urban environments. Our goal is to extend the coverage of a drone delivery service by generating paths for a drone to reach its destination while learning about the energy consumption on each edge on its path in order to optimize its range for future missions. We evaluated the performance of our exploration strategy in finding the set of all reachable destinations in a city, and found that exploring locations near the boundary of the reachable sets according to the current energy model can speed up the learning process.