A system of UAV application in indoor environment

Abstract

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.

Task scheduling system for UAV operations in indoor environment

“…1. Its concept is introduced in a preliminary work [22], which is now discussed in detail in regard to this pilot work. It is a combination of the logical representation of the UAV operations and the physical representation of the UAV environment.…”

“…Phase-based scheduling framework consists of two phases: assignment and anti-collision refinement. From its introduction in the preliminary work [22], the framework has been improved in this work tailoring its solvability. In order to respond to uncertain events, scheduler component needs to find a feasible schedule in a short computation time.…”

“…The following section provides details of the problem addressed and the framework of the proposed system. This study is the real case of the presented preliminary study in [22], and some information is briefly reproduced to give clarity to the reader.…”

“…In phase 1, there are three types of input data: (1) task data, (2) UAV data, and (3) trajectory data [22]. Task data used in phase 1 consist of task identifier, start position, end position, processing time, and precedence relationship.…”

“…A route in the high-level map has the total weight of the respectively comprised paths in the low-level map [22]. High-level map is required for reducing the solution space and computation time during the schedule generation, while low-level map is needed for translating the schedule to UAV-compatible instructions before they are sent to the UAVs.…”