A UAV Mission Planning With Limited Fuel Capacity

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), also referred to as drones, are now being used intensively in many applications including surveillance missions, traffic monitoring, agriculture or disaster and crisis management, since they avoid risking human lives while their manageability permits reaching areas that are hard to access. These vehicles are usually controlled by a number of operators inside one or more Ground Control Stations (GCSs), depending on the size of the mission. This paper presents two new formulations for a single UAV mission planning with limited fuel capacity in a given environment. The first is to obtain the optimal minimum fuel consumption trajectories to accomplish a mission. The second gives the minimum fuel tank capacity to achieve the same mission. A mission starts from a starting point, which is assigned by the ground control station (GCS), from and to which a UAV starts and ends its mission. The mission then continues by visiting a set of tactically located way-points. Due to limited fuel capacity, the UAV has to reconfigure its mission routes among the given set of way-points and an assigned aerial fuel station to successfully achieve the mission. The proposed formulations optimal results are simulated and compared together and also compared with the results of the case where the fuel capacity is not limited to elaborate the difference between these scenarios and clarify the importance of the limited fuel capacity problem and its effect on mission planning.