Increasing Automation on Mission Planning for Heterogeneous Multi-Rotor Drone Fleets in Emergency Response

Drones are increasingly vital for disaster management, yet emergency fleets often consist of heterogeneous platforms, complicating task allocation. Efficient deployment requires rapid assignment based on vehicle and payload characteristics. This work proposes a three-step method composed of fleet analysis, area decomposition and trajectory generation for multi-rotor drone surveillance, aiming to achieve complete area coverage in minimal time while respecting no-fly zones. The three-step method generates optimized trajectories for all drones in less than 2 min, ensuring uniform precision and reduced flight distance compared to state-of-the-art methods, achieving mean distance gains of up to 9.31% with a homogeneous fleet of 10 drones. Additionally, a comparative analysis of area partitioning algorithms reveals that simplifying the geometry of the surveillance region can lead to more effective divisions and less complex trajectories. This simplification results in approximately 8.4% fewer turns, even if it slightly increases the total area to be covered.