Multi-UAV Routing with Priority using Mixed Integer Linear Programming

Abstract

This study proposes a new mission planning method to perform routing with multiple quadrotors. Unlike conventional routing missions, this study considers the specialized routing mission for quadrotors where there is a visit priority between nodes, and there is a task to be performed at the node. One of our contributions is that a multi-layered hierarchical architecture is designed for mission planning itself at the top level, and for interworking with path planning and flight control required at the lower levels. In mission planning, to determine the optimal pair between agents and visiting nodes and the optimal order of nodes, the optimization problem is designed and solved based on mixed-integer linear programming. Furthermore, we evaluate our method by performing MATLAB and Gazebo co-simulation in a ROS environment.