Abstract
In this work, we investigate the problem of finding the minimum coverage time of an agricultural field using a team of heterogeneous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The aerial robotic system is assumed to be heterogeneous in terms of the equipped cameras’ field of view, flight speed, and battery capacity. The coverage problem is formulated as a vehicle routing problem (VRP) [1] with two significant extensions. First, the field is converted into a graph, including nodes and edges generated based on sweep direction and the minimum length of UAVs’ footprints. Second, the underlying optimization problem accounts for aerial vehicles having different sensor footprints. A series of simulation experiments are carried out to demonstrate that the proposed strategy can yield a satisfactory monitoring performance and offer promise to be used in practice.
