Park, Hyorin (KAIST, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering), Morrison, James R. (KAIST)

System Design and Resource Analysis for Persistent Robotic Presence with Multiple Refueling Stations

Scheduled for presentation during the Regular Session "Path Planning III" (ThA1), Thursday, June 13, 2019, 11:40−12:00, Heritage B

2020 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS), June 11-14, 2019, Athens, Greece

This information is tentative and subject to change. Compiled on April 20, 2024

Abstract

Despite the capabilities of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), it is not possible to conduct long-term missions with a just few UAVs due to fuel restrictions. This requires a system that includes multiple UAVs and automated recharging stations for an automatic and persistent service. In order to construct a persistent presence system such as local surveillance and monitoring, it is important to determine the design of the mission and the number of resources required. In this paper, a system consisting of multiple target areas and multiple stations is considered. There are two types of stations: refueling and main stations for maintenance. UAVs can travel further using the refueling stations. A decision-free Petri net model for persistency is developed for cyclic paths including multiple immobile targets and stations. From the Petri net model, we derive a closed-form function for the minimum number of resources in the persistent system. A mathematical model that has the objective function derived from the Petri net is developed. To resolve the computational issue, a genetic algorithm (GA) is used to solve the problem. As the result, the minimum number of resources required and the mission path are derived.