Planning and Coordination for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are a versatile platform that can be used for many data collection applications including emergency response, environmental monitoring, and military intelligence collection, among many others. This extended abstract summarizes our recent advancements in the field of single and multi-UAV route planning and cooperation, with a focus on quadrotors. We first look at how to plan efficient paths and adapt vehicle speed to minimize mission completion time in the presence of energy constraints of UAVs in problems where a single UAV must visit a series of waypoints and then rendezvous with a moving ground vehicle. We then look at a holistic approach for route planning and deploying a team of UAVs to collect data from wireless sensors while minimizing data collection latency. The abstract concludes with a summary of future research directions.