František Nekovář presents Energy-Aware Multi-UAV Coverage Mission Planning With Optimal Speed of Flight

During the seminar, we will present our work on planning energy-aware multi-UAV
coverage missions

Reference:
D. Datsko, F. Nekovar, R. Penicka and M. Saska, "Energy-Aware Multi-UAV Coverage
Mission Planning With Optimal Speed of Flight," in IEEE Robotics and Automation
Letters, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 2893-2900, March 2024, doi:
10.1109/LRA.2024.3358581.

Paper Abstract:
This letter tackles the problem of planning minimum-energy coverage paths for
multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The addressed Multi-UAV Coverage Path
Planning (mCPP) is a crucial problem for many UAV applications such as
inspection and aerial survey. However, the typical path-length objective of
existing approaches does not directly minimize the energy consumption, nor
allows for constraining energy of individual paths by the battery capacity. To
this end, we propose a novel mCPP method that uses the optimal flight speed for
minimizing energy consumption per traveled distance and a simple yet precise
energy consumption estimation algorithm that is utilized during the mCPP
planning phase. The method decomposes a given area with boustrophedon
decomposition and represents the mCPP as an instance of Multiple Set Traveling
Salesman Problem with a minimum energy objective and energy consumption
constraint. The proposed method is shown to outperform state-of-the-art methods
in terms of computational time and energy efficiency of produced paths. The
experimental results show that the accuracy of the energy consumption estimation
is on average 97% compared to real flight consumption. The feasibility of the
proposed method was verified in a real-world coverage experiment with two UAVs.

Link: https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2024.3358581

The seminar will be of a short length (20 minutes + 10 minutes discussion).