Epidemic communication control methods suitable for inter-drone relay in pollination systems

Abstract

The development of a system for pollinating tomato flowers using small drones, instead of bees, is currently underway. This system necessitates the collection of visual data from multiple drones, which are subsequently transmitted to a receiving station. This study used epidemic communication as a communication method that is suitable for pollination systems. However, conventional epidemic communication has a long delay time. To address this problem, we proposed two modifications to the conventional epidemic communication: using directional beams of antennas, and controlling the movement of the drones by weighing the movement at a constant rate. The proposed method was able to reduce the delay time.