The paper presents an approach for coverage path planning for a team of an energy-constrained Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV). The goal is to achieve complete coverage by both robots while minimizing the coverage time. The UGV can also function as a mobile recharging station, and the UAV and UGV need to rendezvous occasionally for recharging. The proposed heuristic method addresses this NP-Hard planning problem by initially determining coverage paths without considering energy constraints. Subsequently, segments of these paths are clustered, and graph matching is used to assign UAV clusters to UGV clusters for efficient recharging management. Numerical analysis on real-world applications shows that compared to a greedy approach, the proposed method reduces rendezvous overhead on average by 11.33%. A proof-of-concept demonstration is provided with a VOXL m500 drone and a Clearpath Jackal ground vehicle, showcasing the system from offline algorithm to field execution.
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by Nare Karapet... at arxiv.org 03-18-2024
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.07621.pdfDeeper Inquiries