Community Drones: A Concept Study on Shared Drone Services

The growing demand for civil drone services across diverse sectors necessitates more efficient and accessible operational models. This paper introduces the Community Drones model, a shared infrastructure framework designed to coordinate regional drone services through automated resource sharing. By consolidating tasks and resources, this approach enhances drone utilization and reduces operational costs and user effort while ensuring high service quality, reliability, and flexibility. At the core of the model is an advanced mission planning system that automates flight scheduling, risk assessment, mission pooling, and resource allocation, taking into account critical factors such as weather conditions, regulatory safety requirements, and task priorities. We propose a system architecture and concept of operations, discuss the regulatory and technological frameworks, and introduce specialized mission planning algorithms tailored to the unique demands of shared drone environments. Simulation-based performance evaluations for a showcase region in Austria demonstrate the technical and economic viability of the proposed model. The results reveal that the Community Drones approach significantly reduces costs, with savings depending on individual and community utilization levels. These findings suggest that drone sharing holds substantial potential for making civil drone services more sustainable and economically attractive.