Cooperative mission planning for a class of carrier-vehicle systems

In this work we focus on mission planning problems in scenarios in which a carrier vehicle, typically slow but with virtually infinite range, and a carried vehicle, which on the contrary is typically fast but has a shorter range, are coordinated to make the faster vehicle visit a given collection of points in minimum time. In particular in this paper we will address two mission planning problems: a first one, in which we have to sequentially visit a list of points under the hypothesis the takeoff/landing sequence is not determined a priori and a second one, a Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), in which the optimal visiting sequence of points has to be determined. Those two problems will be analyzed, sub-optimal heuristics will be presented and their properties pointed out.

[1]  Sanjeev Arora,et al.  Polynomial time approximation schemes for Euclidean TSP and other geometric problems , 1996, Proceedings of 37th Conference on Foundations of Computer Science.

[2]  Richard M. Murray,et al.  Recent Research in Cooperative Control of Multivehicle Systems , 2007 .

[3]  Emanuele Garone,et al.  Cooperative path planning for a class of carrier-vehicle systems. , 2008, 2008 47th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.

[4]  Kevin M. Passino,et al.  Cooperative scheduling of tasks for networked uninhabited autonomous vehicles , 2003, 42nd IEEE International Conference on Decision and Control (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37475).

[5]  Thomas Brylawski,et al.  The lattice of integer partitions , 1973, Discret. Math..

[6]  Andrew B. Kahng,et al.  Cooperative Mobile Robotics: Antecedents and Directions , 1997, Auton. Robots.

[7]  Timothy W. McLain,et al.  Coordinated target assignment and intercept for unmanned air vehicles , 2002, Proceedings 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.02CH37292).

[8]  F. Bullo,et al.  Decentralized algorithms for vehicle routing in a stochastic time-varying environment , 2004, 2004 43rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37601).

[9]  Dimitris Bertsimas,et al.  A Stochastic and Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem in the Euclidean Plane , 1991, Oper. Res..

[10]  Planning Algorithms for a Class of Heterogeneous Multi-Vehicle Systems. , 2010 .

[11]  M. Pachter,et al.  Complexity in UAV cooperative control , 2002, Proceedings of the 2002 American Control Conference (IEEE Cat. No.CH37301).

[12]  Steven M. LaValle,et al.  Planning algorithms , 2006 .