Abstract
We consider planning for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) teams in aerial monitoring missions with ordering requirements on the monitoring points to be visited by the UAV. The system consists of multiple UAV-UGV teams, each comprising one UAV and one UGV. UAV energy limitations are modeled through endurance, defined as the maximum flight time on a full battery. The UGVs serve as mobile charging stations and transport the UAVs between consecutive aerial tours. Given a set of monitoring points subject to ordering constraints and the teams' initial and terminal positions, the objective is to minimize mission completion time while satisfying UAV energy limits and the required visit order under bounded travel-time disturbances that may arise during execution. Unlike prior work, the plan jointly determines vehicle routes and their timing, allowing teams to slow down as needed to satisfy the ordering constraints. We develop a polynomial-time algorithm that generates efficient solutions to the underlying NP-hard planning problem. We establish feasibility guarantees, characterize the algorithm's computational complexity, and evaluate its performance via numerical comparisons.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12670
