Optimal path planning for a team of heterogeneous drones to monitor agricultural fields
Abstract
In this work, we investigate the problem of finding the minimum coverage time of an agricultural field using a team of heterogeneous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The aerial robotic system is assumed to be heterogeneous in terms of the equipped cameras’ field of view, flight speed, and battery capacity. The coverage problem is formulated as a vehicle routing problem (VRP) [1] with two significant extensions. First, the field is converted into a graph, including nodes and edges generated based on sweep direction and the minimum length of UAVs’ footprints. Second, the underlying optimization problem accounts for aerial vehicles having different sensor footprints. A series of simulation experiments are carried out to demonstrate that the proposed strategy can yield a satisfactory monitoring performance and offer promise to be used in practice.
Publication Title
ASME 2020 Dynamic Systems and Control Conference, DSCC 2020
Recommended Citation
Faryadi, S., Davoodi, M., & Velni, J. (2020). Optimal path planning for a team of heterogeneous drones to monitor agricultural fields. ASME 2020 Dynamic Systems and Control Conference, DSCC 2020, 2 https://doi.org/10.1115/DSCC2020-3244
