Communication-Aware Task Assignment for UAV Cooperation in Urban Environments*

This paper addresses the problem of efficiently managing multiple UAV cooperation in complex urban environments while maintaining communication link with the ground station. This involves a few tasks such as exploring areas of interest, keeping network connectivity, and potentially surveilling and monitoring some buildings of interest. As interests of exploring an area and sustaining communication conflict, two different groups of UAVs undertake non-overlapping tasks, i.e., some of them explore the points and the rest act as communication relay. Moreover, the proposed approach decomposes the problem into a sequence of logical phases and solves them step by step. Implementing the sequential solutions provides a visiting sequence of the points for each UAV, and efficient and feasible paths. Note that, in order to generate those paths, the paper also develops a new approach to the Travelling Salesman Problem and multiple Travelling Salesman Problem and uses visibility graphs. Compared to other existing approaches, the proposed approach can dramatically reduce the computational load, the total distance covered by the agents, and the distance difference among agents while keeping the communication link. The performance of the proposed scheme is validated via numerical simulations and compared to other existing solutions such as the Genetic Algorithm or Consensus Based Bundle Algorithm.