Multiple Tasks Assignment for Cooperating Homogeneous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

Using multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to perform some tasks cooperatively has received growing attention in recent years. Task assignment is a difficult problem in mission planning. Multiple tasks assignment problem for cooperating homogeneous UAVs is considered as a traditional combinatorial optimization problem. This paper addresses the problem of assigning multiple tasks to cooperative homogeneous UAVs, minimizing the total cost and balancing the cost of each UAV. We propose a centralized task assignment scheme which is based on minimum spanning tree. This scheme involves two phases. In the first phase, we use the Kruskal algorithm and the breadth first search algorithm to assign all tasks to UAVs and get a proper initial task assignment solution. The second phase involves the Pareto optimization improvement in the solution generated from the first phase. For a single UAV, we use the dynamic programming algorithm to calculate the total cost of completing all assigned tasks. The performance of the proposed scheme is compared to that of heuristic simulated annealing algorithm. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme can solve the homogeneous multi-UAV cooperative task assignment problem effectively.