Autonomous Mission of Multi-UAV for Optimal Area Coverage

• Published in: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 21; no. 7; p. 2482
• Main Authors: Hong, Youkyung, Jung, Sunggoo, Kim, Suseong, Cha, Jihun
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 02.04.2021; MDPI
• Subjects: area coverage; Autonomy; Communication; Computer architecture; Drone aircraft; Drone vehicles; Drones; Earthquakes; Experiments; Field study; Linear programming; mission planning; mixed integer linear programming; Optimization; path planning; Software; task assignment; Traveling salesman problem; unmanned aerial vehicle; Unmanned aerial vehicles; Vehicles; Waypoints; mixed integer linear programming; unmanned aerial vehicle; path planning; task assignment; area coverage; mission planning
• DOI: 10.3390/s21072482
• ISSN: 1424-8220

This study proposes an entire hardware and software architecture from operator input to motor command for the autonomous area coverage mission using multiple unmanned aerial vehicles. Despite the rapid growth of commercial drone services, there are many limitations on operations, such as a low decision-making autonomy and the need for experienced operators to intervene in the whole process. For performing the area coverage mission more efficiently and autonomously, this study newly designs an optimization problem that allocates waypoints created to cover that area to unmanned aerial vehicles. With an optimized list of waypoints, unmanned aerial vehicles can fill the given areas with their footprints in a minimal amount of time and do not overlap each other during the mission. In addition, this study performs both various simulations for quantitative analysis and an outdoor experiment through real hardware implementation in order to verify the performance sufficiently. The methodologies developed in this study could be applied to endless applications using unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with mission-specific sensors.