Autonomous drone control within a Wi-Fi network

Over the past ten years there has been a substantial growth in the expenditure of quadcopter drones. Whilst the greatest expense remains with the military, drones are finding increased use in commercial applications such as construction, agriculture, oil and gas and cinematography. However, a major shortcoming of the quadcopter drone is its limited flight time of 30 minutes. Recharging and replacing batteries, significantly impedes and interrupts the desired drone mission. A possible solution is to deploy a number of drones connected and communicating over a network enabling greater area coverage for the same flight time. This paper describes the development of a multiple drone network constructed from commercially available drones. A single autonomous drone is initially constructed which is able to follow a predefined flight plan. The single autonomous drone is developed to enable the formation of a network with other similarly constructed autonomous drones. Flight command codes are able to be transmitted between drones to instruct the receiving drone to fly a particular flight path. Results presented confirm the performance of the controlled flightpath of the autonomous drone and the ability to pass flight command codes between drones across the network.