Worldwide drone navigation

[Kerbeeb 0]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to make a drone delivery service which works using pickup points. The drone departs at the warehouse, then it has to travel 28 thousand blocks (And possibly even more) to get to the spawn and from there it will either move to the next pickup point and drop off the order there or it will drop it off at the spawn and return to the warehouse. The only problem is that i need a navigation system to send the drone to chosen pickup point, and it will have to charge several times on its way. How would i do this, knowing that even the biggest map possible would not be enough to navigate from the warehouse to pickup point?

 

•  

[BrisingrAerowing 12]

A relay system with multiple nodes (like Factorio Roboports) would probably work well. They could take in packages and sort them to send to other nodes.

[kcinnaJlol 0]

I'm assuming that you fly your drones above the build limit to ensure that you don't hit obstacles

Call one point (probably either the start or world origin (x 0, y 0, z 0)) the 'origin', represented as x 0, y 0 and z 0.

Then you can put the start, every destination and every recharge node in a list with their coordinates relative to the origin and type and have your drones keep their x y and z position relative to the origin in a  (or multiple) variables.

When your drones move, they also add the dx, dy and dz arguments to their relative x, y and z respectively.

You can then set 'routes' from the start to each destination (probably just a list of the indexes of the different nodes in order) and have the drones go to each node and, do one of the following according to what it is:

• Start: Report to the warehouse that you are home, recharge and listen for a network message of a new order and grab required items
• Recharge node: Recharge until battery is about 99% full / whatever is needed to get to the next recharge node
• Destination: Drop off items inside a chest and maybe also recharge

Then, you can listen at the warehouse for 'new order' messages and send them to one drone from the list of 'ready' drones and remove said drone from the list

When a drone reports that its home, you can add it to the list of 'ready' drones to use when a new order comes in.

You can send most of this data (nodes + routes) to the drone over a wireless network when the drone starts

[Kerbeeb 0]

On 2/14/2022 at 3:40 PM, BrisingrAerowing said:

A relay system with multiple nodes (like Factorio Roboports) would probably work well. They could take in packages and sort them to send to other nodes.

This would work, but it'd be really expensive to do. I'll play around on a smaller scale.