Drone Package Delivery: A Heuristic approach for UAVs path planning and tracking

In this paper we propose a new approach based on a heuristic search for UAVs path planning with terrestrial wireless network tracking. In a previous work we proposed and exact solution based on an integ er linear formulation of the problem. Unfortunately, the exact resolution is limited by the computation complexity. In this case, we propose in this paper a new approach based on a heuristic search. More precisely, a heuristic adaptive scheme based on Dijkstra algorithm is proposed to yield a simple but effective and fast solution. In addition, the proposed solution can cover a large area and generate a set of optimum and near optimum pa ths according to the drone battery capacities. Finally, the simulation results show that the drone tracking is sustainable even in noisy wireless network environmen t. Received on 08 March 2017; accepted on 25 August 2017; published on 31 August 2017