Connectivity considerations for mission planning of a search and rescue drone team

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the mission success performance and mission times of centralized, distributed, and hybrid path-planning methods for a drone team whose mission is to find a target and inform the ground control. We propose two methods that integrate connectivity into the search mission path decisions. We observe that even though the coverage path-planning leads to lower search times, when target connectivity is also required, schemes that incorporate end-end connectivity into path planning result in at least 50% better mission times for small communication ranges and lower number of drones. Our results also indicate that methods to efficiently allocate resources to search and communication tasks in mission-oriented drone networks need to be designed.