Online path planning of messenger UAV in air-ground collaborative system

This paper mainly solves an online path planning problem of messenger UAV in an air-ground collaborative system which is composed of a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV) and multiple unmanned ground vehicles(UGVs). The UGVs play the role of mobile actuators, while the UAV acts as a messenger to transmit the information among the UGVs. The online path planning problem for the messenger UAV can be modeled as a Dynamic Dubins Traveling Salesman Problem (DDTSP). The goal of this problem is to find a shortest path which enables the UAV to access all UGVs periodically. This paper proposes an online path planning method based on heuristic rules. The method can be divided into two stages: firstly, the sequence for the UAV to access the UGVs are determined by the heuristic rules which consider the relative positions and movement characteristics of the UGVs and the UAV, and then the access positions of the UAV are determined. Computational results on instances with varying characteristics show that the proposed method can generate high-quality solutions in a very short time. The comparison experiments demonstrate that, compared with another advanced method, our method can achieve a better balance between the quality of the solution and time consumption.