Planning

Joint Fleet Sizing and Charging System Planning for Autonomous Electric Vehicles

Hongcai Zhang
Colin Sheppard
Tim Lipman
Scott Moura
2020

This paper studies the joint fleet sizing and charging system planning problem for a company operating a fleet of autonomous electric vehicles (AEVs) for passenger and goods transportation. Most of the relevant published papers focus on intracity scenarios and adopt heuristic approaches, e.g., agent based simulation, which do not guarantee optimality. In contrast, we propose a mixed integer linear programming model for intercity scenarios. This model incorporates comprehensive considerations of 1) limited AEV driving range; 2) optimal AEV routing and relocating operations; 3) time-varying...

An Assessment of the Near-Term Costs of Hydrogen Refueling Stations and Station Components

Tim Lipman
Jonathan Weinert
2006

Interest in hydrogen as a transportation fuel is growing in California. Plans are underway to construct a “Hydrogen Highway” network of stations across the state to stimulate fuel cell vehicle deployment. One of the key challenges in the planning and financing of this network is determining the costs of the stations. The purpose of this report is to examine the near-term costs of building hydrogen stations of various types and sizes. The costs for seven different station types are analyzed with respect to size, siting factors, and operating factors. The first section of the report reviews...

A Resource Allocation Algorithm for Multivehicle Systems With Nonholonomic Constraints

Rathinam, Sivakumar
Raja Sengupta
Darbha, Swaroop
2007

This paper is about the allocation of tours of m targets to n vehicles. The motion of the vehicles satisfies a nonholonomic constraint (i.e., the yaw rate of the vehicle is bounded). Each target is to be visited by one and only one vehicle. Given a set of targets and the yaw rate constraints on the vehicles, the problem addressed in this paper is 1) to assign each vehicle a sequence of targets to visit, and 2) to find a feasible path for each vehicle that passes through the assigned targets with a requirement that the vehicle returns to its initial position. The heading angle at each...

Path Planning for a Collection of Vehicles With Yaw Rate Constraints

Rathinam, Sivakumar
Raja Sengupta
Darbha, Swaroop
2007

Multi-vehicle systems are naturally encountered in civil and military applications. Cooperation amongst individual “miniaturized” vehicles allows for flexibility to accomplish missions that a single large vehicle may not readily be able to accomplish. While accomplishing a mission, motion planning algorithms are required to efficiently utilize a common resource (such as the total fuel in the collection of vehicles) or to minimize a collective cost function (such as the maximum time taken by the vehicles to reach their intended destination). The objective of this chapter is to present a...

Decentralized Control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Collaborative Sensing Missions

Ryan, Allison
Tisdale, John
Godwin, Mark
Coatta, Daniel
Nguyen, David
Spry, Stephen
Raja Sengupta
Hedrick, J. Karl
2007

Cooperative unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) teams can serve as a mobile sensor networks to autonomously execute sensing tasks in uncertain and dynamic environments. We have implemented a UAV system that performs collaborative sensing missions under the supervision of a single user. Decentralized task allocation and autonomous mission execution are enabled by onboard computing and ad-hoc wireless communication and provide robustness to communication and resource losses in quickly evolving scenarios. The collaboration algorithm combines shared and local information to produce multi-step plans...

An Energy-Based Flight Planning System for Unmanned Traffic Management

Liu, Zhilong
Raja Sengupta
2017

In this paper, we proposed an energy-based flight planning system for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM). Fuel consumption estimation at the flight planning stage is safety critical in general aviation, because energy-related failures are often life-threatening. However, conservative fuel estimation is not economical and environmentally friendly because carrying unnecessary fuel load burns a lot of extra fuel. The same reasoning holds in UTM. Aviation researchers are actively working on optimizing fuel loading, but such research is lacking in UTM. In this paper, we...

A Power Consumption Model for Multi-Rotor Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems

Liu, Zhilong
Raja Sengupta
Kurzhanskiy, Alex
2017

We develop a theoretical power consumption model for multi-rotor Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), estimate the model parameters, and validate it by flying an IRIS+ quadrotor UAS and measuring its energy consumption experimentally. The model is derived from the helicopter literature. Such models are required to create UAS flight planning systems.

An Energy-Based Optimal Control Problem for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Planning

Liu, Zhilong
Kurzhanskiy, Alex
Raja Sengupta
2017

In this paper, we formulate the flight planning problem for a multirotor Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) as an optimal control problem. The cost optimized is the energy consumption at the cruise phase of a mission. We first present a general formulation, then address a special cases: optimizing flight directions given vehicle speed. The problem was solved numerically on digital elevation models (DEM) with the Ordered Upwind Method (OUM). By combining the optimized path with timestamps, we can generate 4D trajectories typically used in aviation flight planning, and thus maximize the...

Assessing the Value of Urban Air Mobility through Metropolitan-Scale Microsimulation: A Case Study of the San Francisco Bay Area

Yedavalli, Pavan S.
Onat, Emin
Peng, Xin
Raja Sengupta
Waddell, Paul
Bulusu, Vishwanath
Xue, Min
2021

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) has garnered billions of dollars in investment with early proofs-of-concept and deployments across the world. However, its viability as a transport mode will be strongly determined by benefits in travel time. Hence, before optimizing the planning and infrastructure provision for UAM’s deployment, the dynamics of UAM trips must first be simulated and understood in order to determine the total addressable market. This work contributes to the existing scholarship in several ways. First, we use an ultra-fast parallelized, GPU-based microsimulator, MANTA, to study the...

An autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Exploration Platform with a Hierarchical Control Method for Post-Disaster Infrastructures

Peng, Xin
Su, Gaofeng
Raja Sengupta
2024

Catastrophic natural disasters like earthquakes can cause infrastructure damage. Emergency response agencies need to assess damage precisely while repeating this process for infrastructures with different shapes and types. The authors aim for an autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) platform equipped with a 3D LiDAR sensor to comprehensively and accurately scan the infrastructure and map it with a predefined resolution r. During the inspection, the UAV needs to decide on the Next Best View (NBV) position to maximize the gathered information while avoiding collision at high speed. The...