Path Planning Optimisation for Multiple Drones: Repositioning the Starting Point

Drones’ power management, and its impact on their applications, faces significant challenges. Path planning, and particularly travelled distance optimisation, has been shown to be a significant factor to enhance their efficiency and effectiveness. Given a scenario where a drone must visit static stations, analysis of the significance of a path’s constituent parts shows that the segments from the launch pad and the first/last station to be visited emerged as the primary candidates for further optimisation. Accordingly, and provided the launch pad’s ability to relocate, a number of alternative approaches are herein proposed as candidates for the adjustment of the launch pad in order to minimise the total distance of multiple drones’ paths. Extensive experimentation taking into consideration multiple scenarios pertaining to varying number of stations and available drones indicates that the reposition of the launch pad as center for all drones’ routes, obtained significant improvements/minimisation in the total distance of the path ranging from 4% to 22%.