Path Planning of Messenger UAV in Air-ground Coordination

This paper addresses a UAV path planning problem for a team of cooperating heterogeneous vehicles composed of one unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and multiple unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). The UGVs are used as mobile actuators while the UAV serves as a messenger to achieve information sharing among the UGVs. The UAV needs to fly over each UGV periodically to collect the information and then transmit the information to the other UGVs. The UAV path planning problem with messenger mechanism is formulated as a Dynamic Dubins Traveling Salesman Problem with Neighborhood (DDTSPN). The goal of this problem is to find the shortest route enabling the UAV to deliver information to all requested UGVs. When solving this path planning problem, a decoupling strategy is introduced to sequentially determine the access sequence of UGVs for UAV and the access location of UAV in the communication neighborhood of each UGV. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is corroborated through computational experiments on several randomly generated instances.