A Reactive Energy-Aware Rendezvous Planning Approach for Multi-Vehicle Teams
Kenny Chour, Jean-Paul Reddinger, James M. Dotterweich, Marshal Childers, James D. Humann, Sivakumar Rathinam, Swaroop Darbha · 2022 IEEE 18th International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE) · 2022
This paper addresses a type of rendezvous recharging problem involving a team of unmanned aerial and ground vehicles (UAVs, UGVs). UAVs are tasked with long-term surveillance and reactivity to events over a wide area, but are subject to energy constraints limiting their operation. UGVs can support UAVs by replenishing their battery via docking. The presented problem is a generalization of well-known NP-Hard problems in vehicle routing. We present a multi-level framework that decouples the challenging problem into smaller sub-problems for solving. The resulting framework is one that interleaves planning and execution for a team of vehicles, allowing for long-term operation and reactivity. We also present simulation results to validate our proposed approach.