Data collection planning with Dubins airplane model and limited travel budget
Petr Váňa, Jan Faigl, Jakub Sláma, Robert Pěnička · 2017
In this paper, we address the data collection planning problem for fixed-wing unmanned aircraft vehicle (UAV) with a limited travel budget. We formulate the problem as a variant of the Orienteering Problem (OP) in which the Dubins airplane model is utilized to extend the problem into the three-dimensional space and curvature-constrained vehicles. The proposed Dubins Airplane Orienteering Problem (DA-OP) stands to find the most rewarding data collection trajectory visiting a subset of the given target locations while the trajectory does not exceed the limited travel budget. Contrary to the original OP formulation, the proposed DA-OP combines not only the combinatorial part of determining a subset of the targets to be visited together with determining the sequence to visited them, but it also includes challenges related to continuous optimization in finding the shortest trajectory for Dubins airplane vehicle. The problem is addressed by sampling possible approaching angles to the targets, and a solution is found by the Randomized Variable Neighborhood Search (RVNS) method. A feasibility of the proposed solution is demonstrated by an empirical evaluation on modified benchmarks for the OP instances to the scenarios with varying altitude of the targets.