Scheduling Spare Drones for Persistent Task Performance with Several Replacement Stations - EXTENDED ABSTRACT

This paper considers the problem of enabling persistent execution of a multi-drone task under energy limitations when several battery replacement stations (homes) are available. The drones are given a set of locations and their task is to ensure that at least one drone will be present, for example for monitoring, over each location at any given time. Because of energy limitations, drones must be replaced from time to time, and fly back to one of a given fixed set of homes where their batteries can be replaced. Our goals are to identify the minimum number of spare drones needed to accomplish the task while no drone battery drains, and to provide a drone replacement strategy.