Eternal Flying: Optimal Placement of Wireless Chargers for Nonstop Drone Flights

In the preceding decades, the drone market has flourished at an exponential rate. We can now easily carry out a variety of tasks by deploying drones, either in a semi/fully autonomous flight mode or remotely controlling them manually. In any case, the main drawback of the current state of the art of drone deployment is the short operational time of the drone due to battery limitations: they must intercept the mission, fly to a charging station, and have their battery replaced, which causes a delay in completing the mission and degrades the overall performance. This paper proposes an optimization algorithm for determining the optimal number of wireless charging stations required to ensure charging capability throughout the entire flight time, allowing drones to complete their missions without stopping for battery replacement. We demonstrate that this is an NP-Hard Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) problem that cannot be solved in polynomial time using the regularly available techniques; thus, we propose an optimization framework to solve the problem efficiently and in a timely manner. To evaluate the performance of our proposed scheme, we conduct a thorough simulation campaign based on real-world experimental data on wireless charger limitations. Our findings validate the algorithm’s performance.