Trajectory Planning for Reconnaissance Mission Based on Fair-Energy UAVs Cooperation

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have recently received growing popularity in reconnaissance missions due to their many advantages, such as high mobility, flexible deployment, and low operational costs. In this paper, we investigate how the UAVs should optimally exploit its mobility via trajectory planning to achieve the fairness of energy consumption with communication, hovering, and motion energy consumption in consideration. Most of the current works only consider motion energy consumption; however, communication and hovering energy consumption cannot be ignored. We first formulate this problem as a min-max tour cover problem that has been proved to be NP-hard. Then, a heuristic algorithm is proposed to minimize the maximum energy consumption of the reconnaissance UAVs by planning the trajectories. Next, to guarantee the fairness of energy consumption under scenarios with strict and firm energy requirements, we propose an approximation algorithm that can achieve an approximation ratio of 2.5. Finally, the extensive simulations are conducted under different settings to evaluate the performance of our proposed algorithms. The results show that the algorithms can improve the fairness of energy consumption and reduce the maximum energy consumption compared with other algorithms.

Keywords

• Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)
• fair energy consumption
• trajectory planning
• heuristic algorithm
• approximation algorithm