Cooperative Route Planning for Fuel-constrained UGV-UAV Exploration

Heterogeneous UGV-UAV system can efficiently complete large-scale tasks such as exploration and rescue by collaborative operation. This paper proposes a route planner based on a dynamic aggregation strategy to select the time-optimal routes for function-constrained UGV and fuel-constrained UAV to reach all the mission points. To reduce the time consumption of waiting at the take-off point, UGV and UAV are inclined to rendezvous at the next meeting point by no-wait operations. We present a two-step routing strategy to address this cooperative problem. First, the Voronoi diagram and greedy set cover method are used to determine meeting points and task areas. Then, solving a traveling salesman problem to find a UGV path by A-star and Lin-Kernighan heuristic. After that, an adaptive large neighborhood search heuristic is proposed to address vehicle routing problem with recharge for UAV among multiple task areas. The simulation and real experiment results demonstrate that our approach can effectively generate a time-optimal path for UGV-UAV Cooperative exploration.