Energy-Efficient Autonomous Navigation of Solar-Powered UAVs for Surveillance of Mobile Ground Targets in Urban Environments

Hailong Huang and Andrey V. Savkin
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Hailong Huang: School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications, University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052, NSW, Australia
Andrey V. Savkin: School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications, University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052, NSW, Australia

Energies, 2020, vol. 13, issue 21, 1-17

Abstract: In this paper, we consider the navigation of a group of solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for periodical monitoring of a set of mobile ground targets in urban environments. We consider the scenario where the number of targets is larger than that of the UAVs, and the targets spread in the environment, so that the UAVs need to carry out a periodical surveillance. The existence of tall buildings in urban environments brings new challenges to the periodical surveillance mission. They may not only block the Line-of-Sight (LoS) between a UAV and a target, but also create some shadow region, so that the surveillance may become invalid, and the UAV may not be able to harvest energy from the sun. The periodical surveillance problem is formulated as an optimization problem to minimize the target revisit time while accounting for the impact of the urban environment. A nearest neighbour based navigation method is proposed to guide the movements of the UAVs. Moreover, we adopt a partitioning scheme to group targets for the purpose of narrowing UAVs’ moving space, which further reduces the target revisit time. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified via computer simulations.

Keywords: unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs); autonomous systems; solar-powered UAVs; control of electric vehicles; applications of solar powered vehicles; energy-efficient UAV navigation; sensing coverage; dynamic coverage; surveillance and monitoring; rapidly-exploring random tree (RRT) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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