Efficient cyclic routing of unmanned aerial vehicles

• Main Author: Ong, Chao Jian
• Other Authors: Huang Shell Ying
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Theory of computation::Analysis of algorithms and problem complexity
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/73921
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Popularity in adapting Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to military and civilian purposes has been growing at an unprecedented rate, allowing for flexible and better use of precious manpower resources. One use of these UAVs includes surveillance of a set of checkpoints, each with their revisit constraints. Coupled with the time constraint for travelling between these checkpoints, the problem then arises on how best to construct a cyclic route that can satisfy all constraints perpetually with a single UAV. While this problem has been discussed about by some papers, which includes a final year report – by Lim Cheng Siang in 2017 – experimenting with an actual solution, none has been about attempting to design an efficient cyclic route. An example includes critical military functions such that checkpoints should not be revisited too often in risking alerting the enemies that they are being monitored. Therefore, this project intends to design an algorithm for planning an efficient cyclic route in order to solve such issues. This report shall illustrate both the algorithm design and how it works, and at the same time, gather data for comparison between the new algorithm and the one proposed by Lim to show how the new algorithm improves the efficiency of the planned cyclic route.