Experimental Validation of the Allocation of UAVs under Communication Restrictions
Chelsea M. Sabo, Kelly De Oliveira Cohen · 51st AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting including the New Horizons Forum and Aerospace Exposition · 2013
A subset of Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) address the problem in which a vehicle is required to service targets by picking them up at an origin and deliver them to their destination. With respect to surveillance functions, this becomes a realistic problem as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are restricted by operating range, data rate, Anti-Jam margins, and cost. Therefore, UAVs must be allocated to pickup targets and then deliver them to a communication range to be able to transmit information back to a command and control HQ. Because most VRPs adopt a minimum distance objective function, this can lead to suboptimal results when information is time critical. Related research developed a new VRP formulation and cost function (minimum delivery latency) and a heuristic for this problem with near-optimal performance and almost linear scalability to address this deficiency. To highlight the usability of this approach, experimental testing in a laboratory environment was completed. Both static and dynamic cases were validated in flight testing on commercially available platforms. Furthermore, the heuristic solutions to the minimum delivery latency objective function were compared to optimal solutions for the minimum distance method to demonstrate how much time can be saved in more realistic scenarios using the new approach.