The working scope and working time of small size unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are limited because of the limited battery capacity. In this work, inspired by aerial refueling for aircrafts, we propose a wireless power transmission (WPT) scheme by categorizing the UAVs into charging UAV (CUAV) and mission UAV (MUAV) for charging UAVs without interrupting the mission. In the proposed aerial refueling scheme, mission UAVs (MUAV) can be recharged by charging UAVs on the fly and operate in a perpetual manner. The feasibility of aerially wireless charging for small UAVs is firstly discussed and evaluated. Then we consider a practical application scenario of multiple MUAVs for collecting data from several points of interest, where the MUAVs are recharged by CUAVs. Accordingly, the issue of scheduling the flying path and charging process of each CUAV to minimize the mission time arises. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based algorithms for scheduling both single and multiple CUAVs are proposed and deployed. Extensive simulation evaluations demonstrate that, by applying the proposed aerial refueling scheme, CUAVs can explore and optimize the scheduling strategies, thereby improving the system performance in terms of mission completion and charging efficiency.

Kun Zhu

Jia Yang

Yang Zhang

Jiangtian Nie

Wei Yang Bryan Lim

Hongliang Zhang

Zehui Xiong

IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking

IEEE Trans. on Green Commun. Netw.

Aerial Refueling: Scheduling Wireless Energy Charging for UAV Enabled Data Collection

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based algorithms for scheduling both single and multiple CUAVs can explore and optimize the scheduling strategies, thereby improving the system performance in terms of mission completion and charging efficiency.

空中加油：为无人机数据采集调度无线能量充电

Category	Quartile
计算机科学	2
计算机科学, 电信学	3

Aerial Refueling: Scheduling Wireless Energy Charging for UAV Enabled Data Collection

ivySCI AI Smartly Parses PDF, Answers Researchers' Questions, and Helps You Understand Papers in Seconds

Journal Info