Kinematic Orienteering Problem With Time-Optimal Trajectories for Multirotor UAVs

In many unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications for surveillance and data collection, it is not possible to reach all requested locations due to the given maximum flight time. Hence, the requested locations must be prioritized and the problem of selecting the most important locations is modeled as an Orienteering Problem (OP). To fully exploit the kinematic properties of the UAV in such scenarios, we combine the OP with the generation of time-optimal trajectories with bounds on velocity and acceleration. We define the resulting problem as the Kinematic Orienteering Problem (KOP) and propose an exact mixed-integer formulation together with a Large Neighborhood Search (LNS) as a heuristic solution method. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach based on orienteering instances from the literature and benchmark against optimal solutions of the Dubins Orienteering Problem (DOP) as the state-of-the-art. Additionally, we show by simulation that the resulting solutions can be tracked precisely by a modern MPC-based flight controller. Since we demonstrate that the state-of-the-art in generating time-optimal trajectories in multiple dimensions is not generally correct, we further present an improved analytical method for time-optimal trajectory generation.