2,264 research outputs found
Drone-aided routing:A literature review
The interest in using drones in various applications has grown significantly in recent years. The reasons are related to the continuous advances in technology, especially the advent of fast microprocessors, which support intelligent autonomous control of several systems. Photography, construction, and monitoring and surveillance are only some of the areas in which the use of drones is becoming common. Among these, last-mile delivery is one of the most promising areas. In this work we focus on routing problems with drones, mostly in the context of parcel delivery. We survey and classify the existing works and we provide perspectives for future research.</p
Optimizing Fuel-Constrained UAV-UGV Routes for Large Scale Coverage: Bilevel Planning in Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems
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 multi-agent system 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 on a small-scale testbed (http://tiny.cc/8or8vz)
underscores the effectiveness of our multi-agent approach.Comment: The paper is submitted to MRS 202
An Overview of Drone Energy Consumption Factors and Models
At present, there is a growing demand for drones with diverse capabilities
that can be used in both civilian and military applications, and this topic is
receiving increasing attention. When it comes to drone operations, the amount
of energy they consume is a determining factor in their ability to achieve
their full potential. According to this, it appears that it is necessary to
identify the factors affecting the energy consumption of the unmanned air
vehicle (UAV) during the mission process, as well as examine the general
factors that influence the consumption of energy. This chapter aims to provide
an overview of the current state of research in the area of UAV energy
consumption and provide general categorizations of factors affecting UAV's
energy consumption as well as an investigation of different energy models
An evolutionary algorithm for online, resource constrained, multi-vehicle sensing mission planning
Mobile robotic platforms are an indispensable tool for various scientific and
industrial applications. Robots are used to undertake missions whose execution
is constrained by various factors, such as the allocated time or their
remaining energy. Existing solutions for resource constrained multi-robot
sensing mission planning provide optimal plans at a prohibitive computational
complexity for online application [1],[2],[3]. A heuristic approach exists for
an online, resource constrained sensing mission planning for a single vehicle
[4]. This work proposes a Genetic Algorithm (GA) based heuristic for the
Correlated Team Orienteering Problem (CTOP) that is used for planning sensing
and monitoring missions for robotic teams that operate under resource
constraints. The heuristic is compared against optimal Mixed Integer Quadratic
Programming (MIQP) solutions. Results show that the quality of the heuristic
solution is at the worst case equal to the 5% optimal solution. The heuristic
solution proves to be at least 300 times more time efficient in the worst
tested case. The GA heuristic execution required in the worst case less than a
second making it suitable for online execution.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in Robotics and
Automation Letters (RA-L
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