Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2019 Sep 18;19(18):4032.
doi: 10.3390/s19184032.

Completion Time Minimization for Multi-UAV Information Collection via Trajectory Planning

Affiliations

Completion Time Minimization for Multi-UAV Information Collection via Trajectory Planning

Zhen Qin et al. Sensors (Basel). .

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are widely used as mobile information collectors for sensors to prolong the network time in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) due to their flexible deployment, high mobility, and low cost. This paper focuses on the scenario where rotary-wing UAVs complete information collection mission cooperatively. For the first time, we study the problem of minimizing the mission completion time for a multi-UAV system in a monitoring scenario when considering the information collection quality. The mission completion time includes flying time and hovering time. By optimizing the trajectories of all UAVs, we minimize the mission completion time while ensuring that the information of each sensor is collected. This problem can be formulated as a mixed-integer non-convex one which has been proved to be NP-hard. To solve the formulated problem, we first propose a hovering point selection algorithm to select appropriate hovering points where the UAVs can sequentially collect the information from multiple sensors. We model this problem as a BS coverage problem with the information collection quality in consideration. Then, we use a min-max cycle cover algorithm to assign these hovering points and get the trajectory of each UAV. Finally, with the obtained UAVs trajectories, we further consider the UAVs can also collect information when flying and optimize the time allocations. The performance of our algorithm is verified by simulations, which show that the mission completion time is minimum compared with state-of-the-art algorithms.

Keywords: mission completion time; trajectory planning; unmanned aerial vehicle; wireless sensor networks.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Monitoring scenario.
Figure 2
Figure 2
FHF trajectory planning algorithm.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Hovering points.
Figure 4
Figure 4
k-cycles algorithm.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Different number of sensors.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Different number of UAVs.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Different communication radius.
Figure 8
Figure 8
Different monitoring area size.

Similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. Ma C., Liang W., Zheng M., Sharif H. A connectivity-aware approximation algorithm for relay node placement in Wireless Sensor Networks. IEEE Sens. J. 2015;16:515–528. doi: 10.1109/JSEN.2015.2456931. - DOI
    1. Zhao M., Li J., Yang Y. A framework of joint mobile energy replenishment and data gathering in Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks. IEEE Trans. Mob. Comput. 2014;13:2689–2705. doi: 10.1109/TMC.2014.2307335. - DOI
    1. Kim H., Han S. An efficient sensor deployment scheme for large-scale Wireless Sensor Networks. IEEE Commun. Lett. 2015;19:98–101. doi: 10.1109/LCOMM.2014.2372015. - DOI
    1. Bukhari S.H.R., Rehmani M.H., Siraj S. A survey of channel bonding for wireless networks and guidelines of channel bonding for futuristic cognitive radio sensor networks. IEEE Commun. Surv. Tutor. 2015;18:924–948. doi: 10.1109/COMST.2015.2504408. - DOI
    1. Mozaffari M., Saad W., Bennis M., Debbah M. Mobile Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for energy- efficient Internet of Things communications. IEEE Trans. Wirel. Commun. 2017;16:7574–7589. doi: 10.1109/TWC.2017.2751045. - DOI

LinkOut - more resources

  NODES
INTERN 1
twitter 2