Optimal Rendezvous Trajectory for Unmanned Aerial-Ground Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper develops an optimal control method for planning UAV trajectories to rendezvous with a moving UGV in the presence of wind disturbances, improving mission efficiency and fuel usage.

Contribution

It introduces a novel optimal control formulation that accounts for UAV and UGV dynamics, wind disturbances, and a tunable aggressiveness index for rendezvous behavior.

Findings

Trajectory planning is reliable under wind disturbances.

The approach reduces fuel wastage compared to stationary refueling.

Numerical results demonstrate effectiveness in various scenarios.

Abstract

Fixed-wind unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are essential for low cost aerial surveillance and mapping applications in remote regions. One of the main limitations of UAVs is limited fuel capacity and hence requires periodic refueling to accomplish a mission. The usual mechanism of commanding the UAV to return to a stationary base station for refueling can result in fuel wastage and inefficient mission operation time. Alternatively, unmanned gound vehicle (UGV) can be used as a mobile refueling unit where the UAV will rendezvous with the UGV for refueling. In order to accurately perform this task in the presence of wind disturbances, we need to determine an optimal trajectory in 3D taking UAV and UGV dynamics and kinematics into account. In this paper, we propose an optimal control formulation to generate a tunable UAV trajectory for rendezvous on a moving UGV taking wind disturbances into account. By a suitable choice of the value of an aggressiveness index in our problem setting, we are able to control the UAV rendezvous behavior. Several numerical results are presented to show the reliability and effectiveness of our approach.