On the joint design of routing and scheduling for Vehicle-Assisted Multi-UAV inspection

The enabling Internet-of-Things, technology has inspired many innovative sensing platforms. One emerging yet powerful IoT sensing platform is the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), which is widely deployed in various fields including photography, inspection, and communications. However, due to limited battery capacities, the hovering time of UAVs is still too short, prohibiting them from undertaking long-range sensing tasks. To accomplish such remote applications, a straightforward solution is to utilize vehicles to carry and launch UAVs. Efficient routing and scheduling for UAVs and vehicles can greatly reduce time consumption and financial expenses incurred in UAV inspection. Nevertheless, previous work in vehicle-assisted UAV inspection considered only one UAV, incapable of concurrently serving multiple targets distributed in an area. Employing multiple drones to serve multiple targets in parallel can significantly enhance efficiency and expand service areas. Therefore, in this paper we propose a novel algorithm referred to as joint routing and scheduling algorithm for Vehicle-Assisted Multi-UAV inspection (VAMU), which supports the cooperation of one vehicle and multiple drones for wide area inspection applications. VAMU allows multiple UAVs to be launched and recycled in different locations, minimizing time wastage for both the vehicle and UAVs. Performance evaluation is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithm when compared with existing solutions.