The Efficiency Improvement of Robots Group Operation by Means of Workload Relocation

Abstract

The paper deals with a problem of workload relocation in a heterogeneous group of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) during the area monitoring under the changing environmental conditions. One of the stages of a monitoring problem solving, involving a UAVs distribution by the scan bands, is described. It was noted that, when this stage is being performed, there is not a possibility to take into account any factors of environment. However, it is important because of on-board energy resources limitations. This fact jeopardizes the fulfillment of the entire mission of the group. To avoid this situation, it was proposed to use a decision-making technique, based on ontological analysis, on the need to relocate the workload in a group of mobile robots. It is shown that with an increase in the number of environmental conditions changes, the time of using extra computing resources decreases, which leads to the need to engage more of them to perform the task. A comparative assessment of the amount of resources involved in the implementation of two analogous methods for solving the problem of workload relocation depending on the frequency of changes in environmental conditions is carried out. The results of experiments have shown that the effectiveness of using the ontology-based method in a dynamic environment is higher than the local device group (LDG) method. This allows to increase the time of joint mission execution by a group of robots.