Fast moving unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are well suited for aerial surveillance, but are limited by their battery capacity. To increase their endurance UAVs can be refueled on slow moving unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). The cooperative routing of UAV-UGV to survey vast regions within their speed and fuel constraints is a computationally challenging problem, but can be simplified with heuristics. Here we present multiple heuristics to enable feasible and sufficiently optimal solutions to the problem. Using the UAV fuel limits and the minimum set cover algorithm, the UGV refueling stops are determined. These refueling stops enable the allocation of mission points to the UAV and UGV. A standard traveling salesman formulation and a vehicle routing formulation with time windows, dropped visits, and capacity constraints is used to solve for the UGV and UAV route, respectively. Experimental validation of the approach on a small-scale testbed shows the efficacy of the approach.
Fast moving but power hungry unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can recharge on slow-moving unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) to survey large areas in an effective and efficient manner. In order to solve this computationally challenging problem in a reasonable time, we created a two-level optimization heuristics. At the outer level, the UGV route is parameterized by few free parameters and at the inner level, the UAV route is solved by formulating and solving a vehicle routing problem with capacity constraints, time windows, and dropped visits. The UGV free parameters need to be optimized judiciously in order to create high quality solutions. We explore two methods for tuning the free UGV parameters: (1) a genetic algorithm, and (2) Asynchronous Multi-agent architecture (Ateams). The A-teams uses multiple agents to create, improve, and destroy solutions. The parallel asynchronous architecture enables A-teams to quickly optimize the parameters. Our results on test cases show that the A-teams produces similar solutions as genetic algorithm but with a speed up of 2-3 times.
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