Fair-Energy Trajectory Plan for Reconnaissance Mission Based on UAVs Cooperation

Due to availability of off-the-shelf devices and low cost, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely used in reconnaissance missions. In this paper, we study the fair-energy trajectory plan of multi-UAV in reconnaissance scenario with motion, hovering and communication energy consumption in consideration. Most of current works only consider the motion energy, however, the hovering and communication energy can not be ignored. We model the fair-energy problem as the minmax tour cover problem, and verify that the problem is strongly NP-hard. We propose a heuristic algorithm which includes tour calculation and tour splitting. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified by extensive numerical results, showing that the maximum energy consumption is reduced by 27% at most compared with other algorithms.