Innovative Flying Strategy based on Drone Energy Profile: an Application for Traffic Monitoring

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly utilized in smart cities to perform traffic monitoring tasks such as multiple object detection and tracking. The task's criticality is dependent on the drones' dynamic altitude, movable camera, and various viewing angles. These challenges are addressed once the UAVs' collected data is received. However, parameters affecting drone data collecting flight operations must also be explored, including drone actual flight time, data collection time, and energy consumption profile. The drone flight time would depend upon the battery capacity and energy consumption profile, which comprises drone movement, data collection, and communication energies. Besides, data collection energy consumption is subjected to video quality, frame rates, and data compression. The installed battery in UAVs is of limited capacity and determining actual flight time, data collection time, and energy consumption profile based on the factors mentioned above is critical. This paper develops and examines a drone energy consumption profile and proposes a drone flight strategy in a surveillance scenario to correctly estimate the drone's actual flight time, data collection time, and the distance the drone could travel from its original location. The results of this analysis are presented as a test case for flying a drone to collect the traffic monitoring data.