On cooperation between a fuel constrained UAV and a refueling UGV for large scale mapping applications

Aerial surveillance and mapping is a primary application area for small Unamnned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Large areas may need to be mapped, leading to long missions. However, mission duration is restricted by the fuel capacity of the UAV. This necessitates refueling the UAV for successful mission completion. All points of interest may not be reachable from a single refueling station and hence multiple refueling stations are required. Further, the refueling stations cannot be placed anywhere in the region, due to terrain restrictions. On the other hand, based on the placement of refueling stations, UAV routes must be designed. Therefore, UAV route planning and placement of refueling stations are coupled problems and obtaining optimal solutions is difficult. In this paper, we develop a greedy strategy for coordination between the mobile refueling UGV and the UAV for successful mission accomplishment. We built a simulation platform in Matlab to test and validate the strategy. Field experiments are also conducted using a quad-rotor to test the proposed strategy.