Path planning of UAV-UGV heterogeneous robot system in road network

Abstract

The previous research on path planning of the UAV-UGV heterogeneous robot system plan paths for both UAV and UGV without considering the UGV’s moving range or plan only the UAV’s path based on the given UGV’s path. In reality, the UGV should be restricted to drive in the road network, and the given UGV’s path is not necessarily the best UGV’s path. In the heterogeneous package delivery system considered in this paper, the UGV’s path was restricted to the road network and the UAV’s and UGV’s paths were optimized simultaneously to get the optimized paths. This paper proposed a two-stage strategy to solve the path planning problem by a hybrid algorithm of modified ant colony optimization and genetic algorithm. The simulation results show that the proposed method is feasible.