Matheuristics for Multi-UAV Routing and Recharge Station Location for Complete Area Coverage.

Luciana Assis,Rafael Santin,Alessandro Vivas,Luciano C A Pimenta

doi:10.3390/s21051705

Abstract

This paper presents matheuristics for routing a heterogeneous group of capacitated unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) for complete coverage of ground areas, considering simultaneous minimization of the coverage time and locating the minimal number of refueling stations. Whereas coverage path planning (CPP) is widely studied in the literature, previous works did not combine heterogeneous vehicle performance and complete area coverage constraints to optimize UAV tours by considering both objectives. As this problem cannot be easily solved, we designed high-level path planning that combines the multiobjective variable neighborhood search (MOVNS) metaheuristic and the exact mathematical formulation to explore the set of nondominated solutions. Since the exact method can interact in different ways with MOVNS, we evaluated four different strategies using four metrics: execution time, coverage, cardinality, and hypervolume. The experimental results show that applying the exact method as an intraroute operator into the variable neighborhood descent (VND) can return solutions as good as those obtained by the closest to optimal strategy but with higher efficiency.

Highlights

Accepted: 24 February 2021As mobile sensing systems, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are a fast and efficient option to perceive the environment due to their quick response capabilities
We propose and evaluate four matheuristics distinguished by different forms of interactions between the multiobjective variable neighborhood search (MOVNS) metaheuristic and the exact method to solve this problem
This paper proposed strategies for the multiobjective location-routing problem in complete area coverage missions using heterogeneous UAV fleets

Summary

Introduction

Accepted: 24 February 2021As mobile sensing systems, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are a fast and efficient option to perceive the environment due to their quick response capabilities. Fixed-wing UAVs are characterized by their long endurance and fast flight speed, suitable for extensive area coverage applications such as monitoring power lines, roads, and pipelines. This UAV type requires some setup time to be launched, as this process usually has to be performed manually [1]. Some models are electric with four hours of endurance [2], and others use a fuel-injected engine that extends the flight time to up to 24 h [3] They cannot perform vertical take-off and landing (VTOL). The most common multirotor UAVs use battery technology that allows

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