Trajectory and Communication Resources Planning for Dual-UAV Data Collection

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be utilized in communication uncovered areas for data collection. This paper studies two UAVs collaborating to collect data from sensors, with one UAV relaying the data to an information center through the other UAV. To shorten task completion time for UAVs, a particle swarm optimization-based method for task allocation and initial trajectories planning of UAVs is first proposed in the paper. Building upon this, this paper proposes a joint planning of communication resources for all sensors and UAVs, as well as trajectories for two UAVs. Due to the complex nature of the proposed problem, an algorithm based on block coordinate descent algorithm is proposed. The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm shortens the task completion time compared to other algorithm.