A Reactive Energy-Aware Rendezvous Planning Approach for Multi-Vehicle Teams

This paper addresses a type of rendezvous recharging problem involving a team of unmanned aerial and ground vehicles (UAVs, UGVs). UAVs are tasked with long-term surveillance and reactivity to events over a wide area, but are subject to energy constraints limiting their operation. UGVs can support UAVs by replenishing their battery via docking. The presented problem is a generalization of well-known NP-Hard problems in vehicle routing. We present a multi-level framework that decouples the challenging problem into smaller sub-problems for solving. The resulting framework is one that interleaves planning and execution for a team of vehicles, allowing for long-term operation and reactivity. We also present simulation results to validate our proposed approach.

I. INTRODUCTION

Unmanned vehicles have become widely popular among researchers in the last decade. Teams consisting of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and ground vehicles (UGVs) can compliment each other in applications such as fire fighting, border security, and infrastructure inspection ([1], [2], [3]). A common theme is persistent monitoring, where vehicles must move periodically around areas of a map over a period of time. A challenge with using UAVs is limited energy supply, i.e., the vehicle must be replenished with energy frequently as needed. To support this effort, static and mobile charging stations are often used.