System for Placing Seismic Sensors Based on Actions of UAVs Group with Optimized Flight Plan

Anton Saveliev; Dmitry Anikin; Andrey Ronzhin; Gennady Erokhin; Vadim Agafonov

Anton Saveliev St. Petersburg Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SPC RAS) https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1851-2699
Dmitry Anikin St. Petersburg Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SPC RAS) https://orcid.org/0009-0007-6998-5687
Andrey Ronzhin St. Petersburg Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SPC RAS) https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8903-3508
Gennady Erokhin Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7656-9496
Vadim Agafonov LLC R-Sensors https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1943-7504

Keywords: Simulation modeling, UAV, Automated planning, Group motion planning, Tasks allocation, Path planning

Abstract

A trajectory planning system for a group of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) designed for seismic exploration tasks is proposed. The developed system is capable of efficiently allocating tasks and planning trajectories even considering large state spaces. The system has low computation cost, considers possible failures of UAVs in the group and provides online trajectory replanning in case of possible collisions. Series of experiments were conducted on real UAVs and in the Gazebo simulation environment, which demonstrated the computational efficiency of the system: the time for distributing tasks among UAVs was 0.007 s, and the maximum time for calculating one trajectory was 0.103 s. A comparison of the proposed solution with other methods for 7 UAVs showed that in terms of the total task completion time, the system outperformed the ECBS-TA method by 1% and the PC-TAFF method by 0.05%. In terms of individual mission execution time, the system surpassed the ECBS-TA method in 6 out of 7 UAVs and PC-TAFF in 2 out of 7 UAVs. The conducted tests demonstrated the effectiveness of the developed solution and the feasibility of its use.