Energy-Efficient Cyclical Trajectory Design for UAV-Aided Maritime Data Collection in Wind

TL;DR

This paper introduces a cyclical trajectory design for UAVs in maritime data collection that effectively reduces energy consumption by considering wind effects and optimizing flight paths for large data volumes.

Contribution

It proposes a novel cyclical trajectory framework that handles arbitrary data volumes efficiently while explicitly accounting for wind effects, improving upon existing methods.

Findings

Cyclical trajectory reduces computational complexity.

Optimized 8-shape trajectory exploits wind for energy savings.

Outperforms single-flight schemes in energy efficiency.

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), especially fixed-wing ones that withstand strong winds, have great potential for oceanic exploration and research. This paper studies a UAV-aided maritime data collection system with a fixed-wing UAV dispatched to collect data from marine buoys. We aim to minimize the UAV's energy consumption in completing the task by jointly optimizing the communication time scheduling among the buoys and the UAV's flight trajectory subject to wind effect, which is a non-convex problem and difficult to solve optimally. Existing techniques such as the successive convex approximation (SCA) method provide efficient sub-optimal solutions for collecting small/moderate data volume, whereas the solution heavily relies on the trajectory initialization and has not explicitly considered the wind effect, while the computational complexity and resulted trajectory complexity both become prohibitive for the task with large data volume. To this end, we propose a new cyclical trajectory design framework that can handle arbitrary data volume efficiently subject to wind effect. Specifically, the proposed UAV trajectory comprises multiple cyclical laps, each responsible for collecting only a subset of data and thereby significantly reducing the computational/trajectory complexity, which allows searching for better trajectory initialization that fits the buoys' topology and the wind. Numerical results show that the proposed cyclical scheme outperforms the benchmark one-flight-only scheme in general. Moreover, the optimized cyclical 8-shape trajectory can proactively exploit the wind and achieve lower energy consumption compared with the case without wind.