FlexDroneRouting - Supporting little helpers in their mission

Drones are a modern and promising technology that is already being integrated into everyday life. Drones have already found their way into the children's rooms of many households as well as into the fleets of logistics companies and emergency services.

A major obstacle to drone use is the low battery capacity of commercially attractive multicopter models. The continuous flight time of current models ranges from 15 to 90 minutes - depending on the size and load of the drone. Currently available ultra-fast charging technologies allow a drone's battery to be fully recharged within about five minutes. Even more impressive are so-called "hot" battery swap technologies. The battery can be changed fully automatically within a few seconds, while the drone does not have to be switched off during the entire process.

In this article, we examine the scheduling of drone missions in which the drone needs to periodically recharge its energy, either by changing the battery or by charging the battery to full capacity. For this purpose, the drone is supported by a mobile charging station. FlexDroneRouting elaborates modern and problem-specific methods from optimization and AI for this problem. The goal is to develop a method that is as flexible as possible and can be adapted for many commercial and non-profit applications. The developed solution approaches are tested in a case study for the search for missing persons in the Alps.

The acronym FlexDroneRouting stands for Flexible Solution Framework for Drone Routing. The research project is done by Catherine Lorenz and Prof. Dr. Alena Otto at the University of Passau. It is a collaborative project with Prof. Daniele Vigo and Prof. Nicola Mimmo, both from the University of Bologna (Italy).