Project Overview

Testing drones in real life is hard. Geographic surveyors of different professions all over the world are looking for visual and statistical data on how drone fleets react to different phenomena. However, running real world tests for these drones can be risky and expensive. This is why many researchers in companies and academia resort to simulation. They can be used to test the battery/energy expenditures under various conditions, as well as explore the quality of coverage (in terms of average arrival to a location of an “interesting event”), etc… However, most of the simulators are “custom-made” and not easy to generalize for comparative studies.

Our project aims to overcome this kind of restriction and provide an environment where different routing/dispatching algorithms for a single drone or a fleet of drones can be compared against each other in terms of desired metrics (e.g., average or worst-case arrival time or coverage). In addition, our project will provide a visualization tool to show the motion plan of the drones executing a mission over an area of interest. This front-end functionality will be supported by a back-end host that will generate the actual data based on a selected algorithm and an input phenomenon-dataset.