Mission planning for heterogeneous tasks with heterogeneous UAVs

This paper investigates the UAV mission planning problem in which one needs to find the optimal plan/schedule to carry out various tasks of different time windows at various locations using a fleet of fixed-winged heterogeneous UAVs. For this realistic and complex UAV mission planning problem, a two-step approach is proposed to solve it: flying path planning and task scheduling. The solution method includes a graph-based search algorithm to solve path planning problem and a MILP-based algorithm to solve task scheduling problem. To test the effectiveness and efficiency of the developed algorithms, experiments were designed and carried out. It shows that the developed algorithms can solve the defined UAV mission planning problem effectively.