In recent years, there has been an increased demand in the use of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in indoor environments such as material handling task in a manufacturing environment and plant/ environment monitoring task in a greenhouse. However, there is a lack of work reported on this topic. This paper presents a detailed study on several UAV systems and UAV scheduling systems. It is followed by a proposed system of UAV application in indoor environment, which comprises components of UAV system addressed in detail; focused on scheduler as the heart of operations. Consequently, system architecture of UAV scheduling system is presented and the framework of scheduler component is included. Scheduler component works in a phased manner to provide a systematic abstraction and achieve an efficient computation time. This study serves as a reference guide for UAV application in indoor environment.
The application of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in indoor environment is emerging nowadays due to the advancements in technology. UAV brings more space flexibility in an occupied or hardly accessible indoor environment, e.g. shop floor of manufacturing industry, greenhouse, and nuclear powerplant. UAV helps in creating an autonomous manufacturing system by executing tasks with less human intervention in a time-efficient manner. Consequently, a scheduler is an essential component to be focused on; yet the number of reported studies on UAV scheduling has been minimal. This work proposes a mathematical model of the problem and a heuristic-based methodology to solve it. To suit near real-time operations, a quick response towards uncertain events and a quick creation of new high-quality feasible schedule are needed. Hence, the proposed heuristic is incorporated with particle swarm optimization algorithm to find a near optimal schedule in a short computation time. This proposed methodology is implemented into a scheduler and tested on a few scales of datasets generated based on real flight demonstrations. Performance evaluation of scheduler is discussed in detail, and the best solution obtained from a selected set of parameters is reported.
Intelligent manufacturing technologies have been pursued by the industries to establish an autonomous indoor manufacturing environment. It means that tasks, which are comprised in the desired manufacturing activities, shall be performed with exceptional human interventions. This entails the employment of automated resources (i.e. machines) and agents (i.e. robots) on the shop floor. Such an implementation requires a planning system which controls the actions of the agents and their interactions with the resources to accomplish a given set of tasks. A scheduling system which plans the task executions by scheduling the available unmanned aerial vehicles and automated guided vehicles is investigated in this study. The primary objective of the study is to optimize the schedule in a cost-efficient manner. This includes the minimization of makespan and total battery consumption; the priority is given to the schedule with the better makespan. A metaheuristicbased methodology called differential evolution-fused particle swarm optimization is proposed, whose performance is benchmarked with several data sets. Each data set possesses different weights upon characteristics such as geographical scale, number of predecessors, and number of tasks. Differential evolution-fused particle swarm optimization is compared against differential evolution and particle swarm optimization throughout the conducted numerical simulations. It is shown that differential evolution-fused particle swarm optimization is effective to tackle the addressed problem, in terms of objective values and computation time.
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