Trajectory Design and Coverage Control for Solar-Powered UAVs

Abstract

This paper explores the benefits and challenges of using solar energy to power unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for surveillance purposes. The task of persistent surveillance requires constant supply of input energy and is of particular significance in a number of applications such as weather monitoring, wildfire control, pollution or contamination detection, target search and other long endurance missions. Here, we consider the task of monitoring a geographical area for events of varying priorities and design optimal trajectories for sufficient continuous coverage of the region and eliminate the need to devise a refueling policy. Trajectories are designed based on how the UAVs collect the solar energy to carry out the mission under a variety of dynamic and endurance constraints. An algorithm is proposed to handle the energy collection and the coverage of the target area. Different goals are set and simulation results are presented to demonstrate the ability of the UAVs to meet these goals.

Navigation and Deployment of Solar-Powered Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Civilian Applications: A Comprehensive Review

“…Then, the coverage-path-planning algorithm is designed to fulfill the task. Papers [93][94][95] research the specific coverage-pathplanning algorithm for SUAVs. Franco et al [93] develop a back-and-forth algorithm for convex and concave areas to find the optimal coverage path.…”

“…However, the main advantage of the proposed method is that both coverage and energy cost are considered and optimized in the problem. Unlike in the previous literature, paper [94] adds a hotspot surveillance strategy to the coverage-planning algorithm. Both dynamic and endurance constraints are considered in the algorithm.…”

Path planning and energy management of solar-powered unmanned ground vehicles

“…Motion planning with respect to solar energy is a relatively new field. For instance, a mission planning algorithm for aircraft in persistent surveillance missions which gather solar energy along their designed paths has been demonstrated (Vasisht and Mesbahi (2015)), but assumes a constant insolation. This drawback is not particularly surprising, as characterizing an environment's insolation is in itself a great challenge -many environments feature nonuniform distributions which can not easily be expressed through fitted continuous functions, which precludes the use of gradient-based optimization techniques.…”

Constrained path planning of unmanned vehicles

“…Research in the area of solar-powered robotics focuses on mission planning and developing energy awareness. For example, persistent operation for surveillance missions can be achieved by gathering solar energy along an optimally designed path [Vasisht and Mesbahi (2015)]. In addition, energy-aware path planning can be accomplished by creating solar maps using a Gaussian regression method [Plonski et al (2013)].…”