Chien-Ming Tseng

Rashid Alyassi, Majid Khonji, Areg Karapetyan et al.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, are being increasingly deployed throughout the globe as a means to streamline monitoring, inspection, mapping, and logistic routines. When dispatched on autonomous missions, drones require an intelligent decision-making system for trajectory planning and tour optimization. Given the limited capacity of their onboard batteries, a key design challenge is to ensure the underlying algorithms can efficiently optimize the mission objectives along with recharging operations during long-haul flights. With this in view, the present work undertakes a comprehensive study on automated tour management systems for an energy-constrained drone: (1) We construct a machine learning model that estimates the energy expenditure of typical multi-rotor drones while accounting for real-world aspects and extrinsic meteorological factors. (2) Leveraging this model, the joint program of flight mission planning and recharging optimization is formulated as a multi-criteria Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem (ATSP), wherein a drone seeks for the time-optimal energy-feasible tour that visits all the target sites and refuels whenever necessary. (3) We devise an efficient approximation algorithm with provable worst-case performance guarantees and implement it in a drone management system, which supports real-time flight path tracking and re-computation in dynamic environments. (4) The effectiveness and practicality of the proposed approach are validated through extensive numerical simulations as well as real-world experiments.

Chien-Ming Tseng, Chi-Kin Chau

The advent of abundant on-board sensors and electronic devices in vehicles populates the paradigm of participatory sensing to harness crowd-sourced data gathering for intelligent transportation applications, such as distance-to-empty prediction and eco-routing. While participatory sensing can provide diverse driving data, there lacks a systematic study of effective utilization of the data for personalized prediction. There are considerable challenges on how to interpolate the missing data from a sparse dataset, which often arises from participatory sensing. This paper presents and compares various approaches for personalized vehicle energy consumption prediction, including a blackbox framework that identifies driver/vehicle/environment-dependent factors and a collaborative filtering approach based on matrix factorization. Furthermore, a case study of distance-to-empty prediction for electric vehicles by participatory sensing data is conducted and evaluated empirically, which shows that our approaches can significantly improve the prediction accuracy.