A flight time approximation model for unmanned aerial vehicles: Estimating the effects of path variations and wind

This chapter examines a flight time approximation model capable of producing a large set of estimated flight times across combinations of possible waypoints in a real-time scenario. This model, in combination with the practical tasks unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) may be required to perform and the wind effects on the UAV, must limit its computational burden despite the obvious combinatorial implications of increasing the number of intermediate waypoints. The chapter then presents the current state of the art for approximation methods. Next, the modeling and importance of including surveillance tasks in previous work is established. The chapter demonstrates the reasoning and methods of adding wind effects into approximation models. It describes three independent variables for the purposes of including wind effects into the flight time approximation model. Finally, the chapter presents a model runtime analysis along with a comparison of actual and approximated flight times.