Energy-aware Mission Planning for Unmanned Ground Vehicle Fleets

Given an unordered list of spatial tasks to be completed by a team of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), this paper formulates and solves energy-aware mission planning for the team operating in an off-road geographic area. The mission planning problem uses the unordered task list and a priori-computed energy and time cost-to-go maps of the mission area to create a complete directed graph as input. The mission planner is formulated as an instance of a multi-objective vehicle routing problem allowing for charging rendezvous with a mobile charging host included in the team. A complete list of constraints and the objective function lead to a mixed-integer program that can be solved with existing tools for various mission scenarios. Example mission planning results are included to demonstrate the workings of the approach.