Cooperative Aerial–Ground Vehicle Route Planning With Fuel Constraints for Coverage Applications

Low-cost unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) need multiple refuels to accomplish large area coverage. We propose the use of a mobile ground vehicle (GV), constrained to travel on a given road network, as a refueling station for the UAV. Determining optimal routes for a UAV and GV, and selecting rendezvous locations for refueling to minimize coverage time is NP-hard. We develop a two-stage strategy for coupled route planning for UAV and GV to perform a coverage mission. The first-stage computes refueling sites that ensure reachability of all points of interest by the UAV and feasible routes for both the UAV and GV. In the second stage, mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) based exact methods are developed to plan optimal routes for the UAV and GV. As the problem is NP-Hard, we also develop computationally efficient heuristics that can find good feasible solutions within a given time limit. Extensive simulations are conducted to corroborate the effectiveness of the developed approaches. Field experiments are also performed to verify the performance of the UAV-GV solution.