Optimal Delivery with a Faulty Drone

TL;DR

This paper investigates an optimal cooperative drone delivery strategy when a drone loses communication, focusing on trajectory planning for a helper drone to ensure successful package delivery.

Contribution

It introduces a new problem model for cooperative drone delivery with communication failures and derives the optimal trajectory based on spatial positioning.

Findings

Optimal helper drone trajectory depends on spatial configuration.

The model accounts for uncertain drone malfunction or communication loss.

Strategies improve reliability of drone delivery in failure scenarios.

Abstract

We introduce and study a new cooperative delivery problem inspired by drone-assisted package delivery. We consider a scenario where a drone, en route to deliver a package to a destination (a point on the plane), unexpectedly loses communication with its central command station. The command station cannot know whether the drone's system has wholly malfunctioned or merely experienced a communications failure. Consequently, a second, helper drone must be deployed to retrieve the package to ensure successful delivery. The central question of this study is to find the optimal trajectory for this second drone. We demonstrate that the optimal solution relies heavily on the relative spatial positioning of the command station, the destination point, and the last known location of the disconnected drone.