Path Planning

[Laura7089]

Drones must be able to be directed to some area (for now, a circle). They should have a set "vision radius", and use that to plot a path that covers the whole area with their vision. As they do this, they should update DMAS with their location: https://github.com/2023-gpig-a/DMAS/issues/17.

[Laura7089]

@BabarKhanDev :

Two options I can think of

1. We want to scan as far as possible We calculate the maximum area that our drones can scan Align our drone with some initial bearing θ This is done by taking the flight range/time of our drones, having them fly to half of that range, fly back to the hub to recharge, and then fly that range again but now at bearing θ + α α can be calculated by taking the angle formed by the diameter of the view of the camera and the range of the drone
2. We scan a specific range if we want to scan a specific range, we can fly to that range, travel the diameter of our camera view across the circumference of our scan range, and then travel home. We rotate by the same angle α and continue

If we have n drones we initially align each drone with a bearing of θ + 2π/n for each of the n drones

Note: this is not the optimal solution because we will rescan some areas again. It is however very simple to implement and each path can be made of a maximum of 3 waypoints.

[Laura7089]

As illustrated in the third diagram above, another option is to generate equally-spaced chords over the search circle and zigzag back and forth along them.