10 research outputs found
Path Planning for Cooperative Routing of Air-Ground Vehicles
We consider a cooperative vehicle routing problem for surveillance and
reconnaissance missions with communication constraints between the vehicles. We
propose a framework which involves a ground vehicle and an aerial vehicle; the
vehicles travel cooperatively satisfying the communication limits, and visit a
set of targets. We present a mixed integer linear programming (MILP)
formulation and develop a branch-and-cut algorithm to solve the path planning
problem for the ground and air vehicles. The effectiveness of the proposed
approach is corroborated through extensive computational experiments on several
randomly generated instances
Routing Unmanned Vehicles in GPS-Denied Environments
Most of the routing algorithms for unmanned vehicles, that arise in data
gathering and monitoring applications in the literature, rely on the Global
Positioning System (GPS) information for localization. However, disruption of
GPS signals either intentionally or unintentionally could potentially render
these algorithms not applicable. In this article, we present a novel method to
address this difficulty by combining methods from cooperative localization and
routing. In particular, the article formulates a fundamental combinatorial
optimization problem to plan routes for an unmanned vehicle in a GPS-restricted
environment while enabling localization for the vehicle. We also develop
algorithms to compute optimal paths for the vehicle using the proposed
formulation. Extensive simulation results are also presented to corroborate the
effectiveness and performance of the proposed formulation and algorithms.Comment: Publised in International Conference on Umanned Aerial System
A Two-Stage Approach for Routing Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles with Stochastic Fuel Consumption
The past decade has seen a substantial increase in the use of small unmanned
aerial vehicles (UAVs) in both civil and military applications. This article
addresses an important aspect of refueling in the context of routing multiple
small UAVs to complete a surveillance or data collection mission. Specifically,
this article formulates a multiple-UAV routing problem with the refueling
constraint of minimizing the overall fuel consumption for all of the vehicles
as a two-stage stochastic optimization problem with uncertainty associated with
the fuel consumption of each vehicle. The two-stage model allows for the
application of sample average approximation (SAA). Although the SAA solution
asymptotically converges to the optimal solution for the two-stage model, the
SAA run time can be prohibitive for medium- and large-scale test instances.
Hence, we develop a tabu-search-based heuristic that exploits the model
structure while considering the uncertainty in fuel consumption. Extensive
computational experiments corroborate the benefits of the two-stage model
compared to a deterministic model and the effectiveness of the heuristic for
obtaining high-quality solutions.Comment: 18 page
Mobile Edge Computing via a UAV-Mounted Cloudlet: Optimization of Bit Allocation and Path Planning
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been recently considered as means to
provide enhanced coverage or relaying services to mobile users (MUs) in
wireless systems with limited or no infrastructure. In this paper, a UAV-based
mobile cloud computing system is studied in which a moving UAV is endowed with
computing capabilities to offer computation offloading opportunities to MUs
with limited local processing capabilities. The system aims at minimizing the
total mobile energy consumption while satisfying quality of service
requirements of the offloaded mobile application. Offloading is enabled by
uplink and downlink communications between the mobile devices and the UAV that
take place by means of frequency division duplex (FDD) via orthogonal or
non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) schemes. The problem of jointly
optimizing the bit allocation for uplink and downlink communication as well as
for computing at the UAV, along with the cloudlet's trajectory under latency
and UAV's energy budget constraints is formulated and addressed by leveraging
successive convex approximation (SCA) strategies. Numerical results demonstrate
the significant energy savings that can be accrued by means of the proposed
joint optimization of bit allocation and cloudlet's trajectory as compared to
local mobile execution as well as to partial optimization approaches that
design only the bit allocation or the cloudlet's trajectory.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular
Technolog
The UJI Aerial Librarian Robot: A Quadcopter for Visual Library Inventory and Book Localisation
Over time, the field of robotics has provided solutions to automate routine tasks in different scenarios. In particular, libraries are awakening great interest in automated tasks since they are semi-structured environments where machines coexist with humans and several repetitive operations could be automatically performed. In addition, multirotor aerial vehicles have become very popular in many applications over the past decade, however autonomous flight in confined spaces still presents a number of challenges and the use of small drones has not been reported as an automated inventory device within libraries. This paper presents the UJI aerial librarian robot that leverages computer vision techniques to autonomously self-localize and navigate in a library for automated inventory and book localization. A control strategy to navigate along the library bookcases is presented by using visual markers for self-localization during a visual inspection of bookshelves. An image-based book recognition technique is described that combines computer vision techniques to detect the tags on the book spines, followed by an optical character recognizer (OCR) to convert the book code on the tags into text. These data can be used for library inventory. Misplaced books can be automatically detected, and a particular book can be located within the library. Our quadrotor robot was tested in a real library with promising results. The problems encountered and limitation of the system are discussed, along with its relation to similar applications, such as automated inventory in warehouses.Support for the research conducted at UJI Robotic Intelligence Laboratory is provided in part by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (DPI2015-69041-R), by Universitat Jaume I (UJI-B2018-74), and by Generalitat Valenciana (PROMETEO/2020/034, GV/2020/051)
Two-Echelon Vehicle and UAV Routing for Post-Disaster Humanitarian Operations with Uncertain Demand
Humanitarian logistics service providers have two major responsibilities
immediately after a disaster: locating trapped people and routing aid to them.
These difficult operations are further hindered by failures in the
transportation and telecommunications networks, which are often rendered
unusable by the disaster at hand. In this work, we propose two-echelon vehicle
routing frameworks for performing these operations using aerial uncrewed
autonomous vehicles (UAVs or drones) to address the issues associated with
these failures. In our proposed frameworks, we assume that ground vehicles
cannot reach the trapped population directly, but they can only transport
drones from a depot to some intermediate locations. The drones launched from
these locations serve to both identify demands for medical and other aids
(e.g., epi-pens, medical supplies, dry food, water) and make deliveries to
satisfy them. Specifically, we present two decision frameworks, in which the
resulting optimization problem is formulated as a two-echelon vehicle routing
problem. The first framework addresses the problem in two stages: providing
telecommunications capabilities in the first stage and satisfying the resulting
demands in the second. To that end, two types of drones are considered. Hotspot
drones have the capability of providing cell phone and internet reception, and
hence are used to capture demands. Delivery drones are subsequently employed to
satisfy the observed demand. The second framework, on the other hand, addresses
the problem as a stochastic emergency aid delivery problem, which uses a
two-stage robust optimization model to handle demand uncertainty. To solve the
resulting models, we propose efficient and novel solution approaches
Intelligent Autonomous Decision-Making and Cooperative Control Technology of High-Speed Vehicle Swarms
This book is a reprint of the Special Issue “Intelligent Autonomous Decision-Making and Cooperative Control Technology of High-Speed Vehicle Swarms”,which was published in Applied Sciences