Efficient path planning for unmanned aerial vehicle with refuelling stations
Mbyayingabo Jean Marie Vianney, Longjiang Li, Uwizeye Erneste, Kagaju Clarisse, Haoyang Liang · 2018
Unmanned Air vehicle (UAV) is a preferred option for the country of Rwanda to distribute blood supply to different remote hospitals in the country. However, the execution of such a persistent mission demands for an extended path planning with refuelling stations (RS) to extent flight time, which is proven a NP-hard problem. This paper proposes a novel UAV path planning (UPP) algorithm for the routing problem, which borrows the idea of the classic Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing protocol (GPSR) to make local decisions of RS selection. Since most routing operations are made locally and do not depend on the knowledge of whole topology, the UPP algorithm can achieve a much less computation complexity than previous algorithms. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme also achieves a less end-to-end trip delay than existing methods, when the refuelling time becomes a substantial factor.