Quantum Annealing Solutions for Drone Route Planning Problems

We present annealing solutions for route optimization problems for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), The route planning problem is a generalised version of the Travelling Salesman Problem which has many applications in logistics planning. Our annealing solutions combine classical algorithms with quantum/digital annealers specifically designed for quadratic optimization problems and shows improvements over generic traditional solvers such as Gurobi. We empirically test the solvability of our annealing solutions on both hand-crafted hard test cases as well as simulated ‘real-world’ examples of urban environments where the operations of the UAVs can be affected by the direction and intensity of wind, which is conditioned by the presence of buildings.