A multi-objective approach for unmanned aerial vehicle routing problem with soft time-windows constraints

Aerial robotics can be very useful to perform complex tasks in a distributed and cooperative fashion, such as localization of targets and search of point of interests (Pots). In this work, we propose a distributed system of autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), able to self-coordinate and cooperate in order to ensure both spatial and temporal coverage of specific time and spatial varying Pols. In particular, we consider an UAVs system able to solve distributed dynamic scheduling problems, since each device is required to move towards a certain position in a certain time. We give a mathematical formulation of the problem as a multi-criteria optimization model, in which the total distances traveled by the UAVs (to be minimized), the customer satisfaction (to be maximized) and the number of used UAVs (to be minimized) are considered simultaneously. A dynamic variant of the basic optimization model, defined by considering the rolling horizon concept, is shown. We introduce a case study as an application scenario, where sport actions of a football match are filmed through a distributed UAVs system. The customer satisfaction and the traveled distance are used as performance parameters to evaluate the proposed approaches on the considered scenario. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.