Combined Routing and Scheduling of Heterogeneous Transport and Service Agents
Saaketh Narayan, James Paulos, Steven W. Chen, Sandeep Manjanna, Vijay Kumar
Abstract
This paper investigates servicing waypoints in a wide area using collaborative deployments of vehicles with heterogeneous range and mobility constraints. We formulate a joint planning problem for a single transport truck and multiple service drones in which the truck is constrained to a road and must deploy a team of range-constrained drones to visit waypoints. The need to deploy, collect, and redeploy drones over multiple flights introduces both route finding and scheduling aspects to this problem. We solve large problem instances by decoupling our approach into a service drone route finding phase and a transport truck scheduling phase. Numerical simulations explore the qualitative character of the driving schedule and the quantitative marginal value of adding additional drones to the team as a function of agent number and relative speed. The combination of road network constraints and range constraints make this problem especially relevant to wide area forestry, last-mile delivery, and ecological monitoring applications.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{iros2021_combinedroutinga,
title = {Combined Routing and Scheduling of Heterogeneous Transport and Service Agents},
author = {Saaketh Narayan and James Paulos and Steven W. Chen and Sandeep Manjanna and Vijay Kumar},
booktitle = {IROS 2021},
year = {2021}
}