Exploiting Land Transport to Improve the UAV's Performances for Longer Mission Coverage in Smart Cities

Abstract

This contribution presents a solution to improve the performances of micro unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) by increasing their missions coverage in terms of distance and time. This is achieved by letting the UAV ride existing land public transport such as the city bus throughout the route to its mission location. Indeed, due to their limited battery capacity, micro-UAVs flying time is restrained, which affects their mission and coverage performances. In this paper, we propose to leverage the use of public transport infrastructure, such as city buses, to carry the UAVs whenever it is possible in order to minimize their flight energy consumption. For this purpose, a generic scheduling framework to efficiently cover spatially and temporally distributed events in a geographical area of interest over a long period of time is proposed. By considering the public transport schedule table, a mixed integer linear programming problem (MILP) aiming at minimizing the total energy consumption of the UAVs is formulated while accomplishing all the pre-scheduled missions. The proposed proactive UAV scheduling framework optimizes the UAV trips according to the mission occurrence and the schedule table of the buses. The obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of the collaboration between the UAVs and the land transport to improve the overall UAV missions' performances in terms of distance coverage.