Mission planning of the aerial-sea cooperative search and clean for the surface pollutant

In this study, the aerial-sea cooperative system is deployed to perform the Search and Clean (SAC) mission for the surface pollutant (i.e., garbage and oil area), and the SAC phases run in parallel to improve work efficiency. A boundary following algorithm is proposed for the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to determine the shape of oil area, and the oil area is cleaned by the sail of Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) using the boundary clean route planning algorithm. Complicated situations, such as task allocation for the surface pollutant, conflicts between UAVs or USVs and limited battery capacity of UAV, are all dealt with in the designed strategies. Simulation results demonstrate that the surface pollutant can be searched and cleaned by the UAVs and USVs efficiently. Compared to the popular sweep approach, the proposed boundary following algorithm and boundary clean route planning algorithm are more flexible and can reduce the sailing distance of UAV and USV. The parallel work mode is also more efficient than the serial work mode in the SAC mission.