Towards Reliable Aerial Ground Vehicle Collaboration: An Integrated Planning and Autonomy Framework for Field Deployment

Limited flight endurance significantly restricts the operational range of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in long duration missions such as surveillance and inspection, where multiple spatially distributed Areas of Interest (AOIs) must be visited. These tasks require efficient routing determining the sequence of visits which directly impacts mission time, energy consumption, and overall feasibility. Pairing UAVs with unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) for mobile recharging offers a promising solution, but introduces a tightly coupled cooperative routing problem involving UAV route planning, UGV road constrained movement, energy management, and rendezvous scheduling under uncertainty. In this work, we present an integrated planning and autonomy framework for reliable field deployment. We formulate the problem as an energy constrained cooperative routing task and solve it using a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) based planner that jointly optimizes the UAV visitation sequence and rendezvous locations with the UGV, outperforming baseline heuristics in minimizing total mission time. To bridge the gap between planning and execution, we introduce a standardized two layer YAML based mission API that captures environment states and structures lightweight, synchronized action sequences. This framework is supported by a complete autonomy stack using PX4/MAVSDK for UAV control and ROS 2/Nav2 for UGV navigation. Furthermore, we propose a lightweight Rendezvous Aware Replanner (RARP) that operates online to handle environmental uncertainties, reducing energy margin violations from 83.33% to 20.00%. The full system is validated through outdoor field experiments, demonstrating robust cooperative navigation and adaptability in dynamic tasks, including a search and rescue scenario with vision language model (VLM) based hazard detection

How to Coordinate UAVs and UGVs for Efficient Mission Planning? Optimizing Energy-Constrained Cooperative Routing with a DRL Framework

Efficient mission planning for cooperative systems involving Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) requires addressing energy constraints, scalability, and coordination challenges between agents. UAVs excel in rapidly covering large areas but are constrained by limited battery life, while UGVs, with their extended operational range and capability to serve as mobile recharging stations, are hindered by slower speeds. This heterogeneity makes coordination between UAVs and UGVs critical for achieving optimal mission outcomes. In this work, we propose a scalable deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework to address the energy-constrained cooperative routing problem for multi-agent UAV-UGV teams, aiming to visit a set of task points in minimal time with UAVs relying on UGVs for recharging during the mission. The framework incorporates sortie-wise agent switching to efficiently manage multiple agents, by allocating task points and coordinating actions. Using an encoder-decoder transformer architecture, it optimizes routes and recharging rendezvous for the UAV-UGV team in the task scenario. Extensive computational experiments demonstrate the framework's superior performance over heuristic methods and a DRL baseline, delivering significant improvements in solution quality and runtime efficiency across diverse scenarios. Generalization studies validate its robustness, while dynamic scenario highlights its adaptability to real-time changes with a case study. This work advances UAV-UGV cooperative routing by providing a scalable, efficient, and robust solution for multi-agent mission planning.

Cooperative Multi-Agent Planning Framework for Fuel Constrained UAV-UGV Routing Problem

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), although adept at aerial surveillance, are often constrained by limited battery capacity. By refueling on slow-moving Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs), their operational endurance can be significantly enhanced. This paper explores the computationally complex problem of cooperative UAV-UGV routing for vast area surveillance within the speed and fuel constraints, presenting a sequential multi-agent planning framework for achieving feasible and optimally satisfactory solutions. By considering the UAV fuel limits and utilizing a minimum set cover algorithm, we determine UGV refueling stops, which in turn facilitate UGV route planning at the first step and through a task allocation technique and energy constrained vehicle routing problem modeling with time windows (E-VRPTW) we achieve the UAV route at the second step of the framework. The effectiveness of our multi-agent strategy is demonstrated through the implementation on 30 different task scenarios across 3 different scales. This work offers significant insight into the collaborative advantages of UAV-UGV systems and introduces heuristic approaches to bypass computational challenges and swiftly reach high-quality solutions.