The recent technological evolution of drones along with the constantly growing maturity of its commercialization, has led to the emergence of novel drone-based applications within the field of wireless sensor networks for information collection purposes. In such settings, especially when deployed in outdoor environments with limited external control, energy consumption and robustness are challenging problems for the system’s operation. In the present paper, a drone-assisted wireless sensor network is studied, the aim being to coordinate the routing of information (among the ground nodes and its propagation to the drone), investigating several drone trajectories or route shapes and examining their impact on information collection (the aim being to minimize transmissions and consequently, energy consumption). The main contribution lies on the proposed algorithms that coordinate the communication between (terrestrial) sensor nodes and the drone that may follow different route shapes. It is shown through simulations using soft random geometric graphs that the number of transmitted messages for each drone route shape depends on the rotational symmetry around the center of each shape. An interesting result is that the higher the order of symmetry, the lower the number of transmitted messages for data collection. Contrary, for those cases that the order of symmetry is the same, even for different route shapes, similar number of messages is transmitted. In addition to the simulation results, an experimental demonstration, using spatial data from grit bin locations, further validates the proposed solution under real-world conditions, demonstrating the applicability of the proposed approach.

无人机的最新技术发展以及其商业化的日趋成熟，已经导致无线传感器网络领域中基于信息的新型无人机应用的出现。在这种情况下，尤其是在外部控制受限的室外环境中部署时，能耗和坚固性是系统运行面临的难题。在本文中，研究了无人机辅助的无线传感器网络，其目的是协调信息的路由（在地面节点之间及其向无人机的传播），研究几种无人机的轨迹或路由形状，并研究它们对信息的影响。收集（目的是最大程度地减少传输并因此减少能耗）。主要贡献在于所提出的算法，该算法可协调（地面）传感器节点与可能遵循不同路线形状的无人机之间的通信。通过使用软随机几何图形进行的仿真显示，每种无人机路线形状的传输消息数取决于围绕每个形状的中心旋转对称。一个有趣的结果是，对称顺序越高，用于数据收集的传输消息的数量越少。相反，对于对称顺序相同的情况，即使对于不同的路由形状，也将发送相似数量的消息。除模拟结果外，使用来自沙砾仓位置的空间数据进行的实验演示进一步验证了所提出的解决方案在现实世界中的条件，从而证明了所提出方法的适用性。