DITHER: Digital Twin for Energy Estimation of Heterogeneous Swarm of Robots

The increasing adoption of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in industrial applications such as construction inspection and infrastructure monitoring necessitates the development of efficient path planning and energy management strategies. This paper presents DITHER, a Digital Twin system designed for energy consumption profiling and management in UAV-based construction inspection tasks. The proposed system integrates real-time data acquisition, energy consumption profiling, and path optimization using a hybrid approach combining path planning and energy efficiency models. Experiments conducted with a DJI Tello UAV show that the digital twin framework facilitate UAV operational in complex inspection tasks by balancing energy consumption and path length. The proposed system can be extended to support multi-UAV collaborative operations in future research.