Abstract
This paper presents a solution for the problem of minimum time coverage of ground areas using a group of unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) equipped with image sensors. The solution is divided into two parts: (i) the task modeling as a graph whose vertices are geographic coordinates determined in such a way that a single UAV would cover the area in minimum time; and (ii) the solution of a mixed integer linear programming problem, formulated according to the graph variables defined in the first part, to route the team of UAVs over the area. The main contribution of the proposed methodology, when compared with the traditional vehicle routing problem’s (VRP) solutions, is the fact that our method solves some practical problems only encountered during the execution of the task with actual UAVs. In this line, one of the main contributions of the paper is that the number of UAVs used to cover the area is automatically selected by solving the optimization problem. The number of UAVs is influenced by the vehicles’ maximum flight time and by the setup time, which is the time needed to prepare and launch a UAV. To illustrate the methodology, the paper presents experimental results obtained with two hand-launched, fixed-wing UAVs.
Highlights
The world is on the verge of a major breakthrough, as we reach a moment in history when unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) flights become regulated in many countries around the world
This paper presents a methodology for optimal time coverage of ground areas using multiple fixed-wing UAVs
This paper presented a methodology for the coverage and sensing of ground areas using fixed-wing
Summary
The world is on the verge of a major breakthrough, as we reach a moment in history when UAV flights become regulated in many countries around the world. Companies from different fields are currently using UAV and sensor technologies to acquire information of ground regions and to reduce the time and costs of operation. This work, which was motivated and mainly financed by FINEP (Funding Agency for Studies and Projects), a funding agency of the Brazilian government, deals with one of the most common uses of aerial robot technologies, which is the one for obtaining a series of overlapping aerial images from the ground. These images are usually post-processed for the extraction of desired information, such as digital terrain maps and vegetation indexes. We propose an area coverage path planning strategy to obtain images of the ground considering a multi-UAV scenario
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