PYTHON · NUMPY

Plan a Mission

Order a set of survey waypoints into a short tour so the aircraft covers the area without wasting battery on backtracking.

01Challenge

Ten survey points scattered over a field. Fly them in the order they were listed and you crisscross the map. Reorder them into a short route — a nearest-neighbor tour — that measurably cuts the total distance.

02Model

A mission is a plan over space, and space costs battery. Given points to visit, the order is the decision. The naive order — as-listed — zigzags. A greedy nearest-neighbor tour always flies to the closest unvisited point next; it isn't the theoretical optimum, but it slashes the crisscrossing for almost no compute, which is what a flight computer can afford. Planning is choosing the cheap path through a space of options before you burn a single amp-hour.

03Guided practice

Worked: place points, measure the as-listed tour length. Faded: build a greedy nearest-neighbor order. Independent: confirm the greedy tour is meaningfully shorter.

04Feedback

PASS WHEN The nearest-neighbor tour is meaningfully shorter than the as-listed order — a cheaper plan.

If your run fails, check:

FAIL: little improvement — the greedy step isn't picking the closest unvisited point.
FAIL: revisits points — track the unvisited set so each point is flown once.

05Retrieve & space

Is nearest-neighbor optimal? (No — but it's fast and close, which flight compute can afford.)
What does distance stand in for here? (Battery / flight time — the real budget.)
When would you pay for a better planner? (Long missions where the greedy gap costs a full battery.)

06Mastery & project

Builds a greedy tour that cuts mission distance versus the naive order (L2: plan a low-cost path through a space of options).

The waypoint order becomes the setpoint sequence the Module-1 controller flies, and the coverage plan each drone owns in Module 5.

GO FURTHER · THE LIVE PLAYGROUND

Fly a mission in the Bayou Air Corridor ↗ — a live drone-airspace operations twin over real Houston geography

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PYTHON · NUMPY

Plan a Mission

Reorder survey waypoints into a shorter nearest-neighbor tour.

You read

the arrays and values already in scope

You change

the code you write in each cell

Fixed

the dataset and the checks that grade you