Cooperative Mission Planning for a Class of Carrier-Vehicle Systems.

In this work we focus on mission planning problems in scenarios in which a carrier vehicle, typically slow but with virtually infinite range, and a carried vehicle, which on the contrary is typically fast but has a shorter range, are coordinated to make the faster vehicle visit a given collection of points in minimum time. In particular in this paper we will address two mission planning problems: a first one, in which we have to sequentially visit a list of points under the hypothesis the takeoff/landing sequence is not determined a priori and a second one, a Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), in which the optimal visiting sequence of points has to be determined. Those two problems will be analyzed, sub-optimal heuristics will be presented and their properties pointed out.