Improving endurance of autonomous aerial vehicles through intelligent service-station placement

A limitation of small-scale, autonomous, vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) vehicles is their relatively short flight time. This hinders their broad applicability for many commercial applications. In previous work, we present the design and implementation of ISLANDS, an autonomous self-leveling landing platform for VTOL vehicles, along with an initial approach to their placement in the field of work. In this paper, we present several new approaches for improved station placement in a field of work of arbitrary shape and size, given sensor characteristics and the nature of the application. We present these algorithms in the context of a generic survey application, but they generalize to many other applications such as search and rescue, traffic monitoring, and environment monitoring.