An Envy-Free Online UAV Charging Scheme with Vehicle-Mounted Mobile Wireless Chargers

TL;DR

This paper introduces an online, envy-free UAV recharging scheme using vehicle-mounted wireless chargers, leveraging auction-based allocation to improve energy efficiency and fairness in UAV operations.

Contribution

It presents a novel cooperative air-ground recharging framework with an auction-based allocation method that is strategy-proof, envy-free, and stable, enhancing UAV energy management.

Findings

Outperforms benchmarks in energy allocation efficiency

Ensures strategy-proof and envy-free allocation

Provides stable matching between UAVs and ground vehicles

Abstract

In commercial unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications, one of the main restrictions is UAVs' limited battery endurance when executing persistent tasks. With the mature of wireless power transfer (WPT) technologies, by leveraging ground vehicles mounted with WPT facilities on their proofs, we propose a mobile and collaborative recharging scheme for UAVs in an on-demand manner. Specifically, we first present a novel air-ground cooperative UAV recharging framework, where ground vehicles cooperatively share their idle wireless chargers to UAVs and a swarm of UAVs in the task area compete to get recharging services. Considering the mobility dynamics and energy competitions, we formulate an energy scheduling problem for UAVs and vehicles under practical constraints. A fair online auction-based solution with low complexity is also devised to allocate and price idle wireless chargers on vehicular proofs in real time. We rigorously prove that the proposed scheme is strategy-proof, envy-free, and produces stable allocation outcomes. The first property enforces that truthful bidding is the dominant strategy for participants, the second ensures that no user is better off by exchanging his allocation with another user when the auction ends, while the third guarantees the matching stability between UAVs and UGVs. Extensive simulations validate that the proposed scheme outperforms benchmarks in terms of energy allocation efficiency and UAV's utility.