Routing Drones Being Aware of Wind Conditions: a Case Study

In this paper, we investigate the manner in which energy consumption in drone deliveries is affected by windy environmental conditions. We know in fact that the energy consumption of the drone will depend on the static and dynamic parameters of the scenario where it moves and according to these it decides, during the mission, to detour from the originally planned path to take advantage of the wind changes. In order to validate this, we simulate possible deliveries among fixed destinations relying on a real data-set of recorded winds obtained from different weather stations in Corsica, France. For our analysis, we will mainly concentrate on the evaluation of the delivery scheme proposed in the literature, where completing a delivery means finding a cycle for the drone that is feasible, i.e., that can be completed with the available energy autonomy of the drone.