Coverage Path Planning for Internet of Drones

Abstract

Drones have been used in several applications, such as monitoring, search and rescue, urban sensing, traffic management, and delivery of goods. Soon, all these applications must share the same airspace forming the Internet of Drones (IoD). The IoD will allow the controlled access of drones to the airspace through the airways, guaranteeing the environment safety, management, and fair use. One of the most prominent challenges of IoD is the mobility of drones that might happen freely in space or along predefined airways, as expected in urban environments. Scanning applications such as monitoring, search and rescue, and sensing may require drones to cover an entire metropolitan area. In IoD, path planning for a drone, in the case of airways, must consider factors such as the number of drones available in the application and the airways. In this work, we propose a method of coverage path planning for IoD (CPP-IoD). Specifically, we introduce a technique that considers the IoD environment. Our results show better path planning coverage regarding traveled distance and uniformity between drone paths compared to the baseline algorithm.