Drones are widely used in area coverage and scanning operations. Typical application domains include mapping, agriculture, search & rescue, security, surveillance etc. Existing technologies present a wide variety of single drone solutions, where a field operator controls the drone, repeatedly assigning simple tasks. These solutions don't scale, as they are not designed for the coordination of even two drones. We believe that the potential of drone technology lies in the ability to easily and safely control multiple drones in a robust and flexible way.

A fully fledged mission control allowing a single operator to control complex, multi-drone missions. System controller provides a set of high level scanning tasks (or predefined set of waypoints), while scheduling and path planning for the drones assigned to the mission is performed automatically.

To the extent possible, the plan is optimized for efficiency. For example, in a scan-once type of mission the plan minimizes the completion time. In a continuous-scan type of mission, the system minimizes the time between two successive scans of any point in the target region.

Mission operator can change the mission at any time: allocation of new drones to the mission, discharging of drones, changes of any type in target areas - automatically result in new plans.

The system supports a wide variety of area constructs, such as: scan-once or continuous-scan regions and any combination thereof, paths, disconnected complicated geometry etc. The modular architecture allows for easy extension to new constructs.