Energy-Efficient Trajectory Design for UAV-Aided Maritime Data Collection in Wind

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), especially fixed-wing ones that withstand strong winds, have great potential for oceanic exploration and research. This paper studies a UAV-aided maritime data collection system with UAV dispatched to collect from marine buoys. We aim minimize the UAV’s energy consumption in completing task by jointly optimizing communication time scheduling among buoys flight trajectory subject wind effect. The conventional successive convex approximation (SCA) method can provide efficient sub-optimal solutions collecting small/moderate volume, whereas solution heavily relies on initialization has not explicitly considered effect, while computational/trajectory complexity both become prohibitive large volume. To this end, we propose new cyclical design framework tailored algorithm handle arbitrary volume efficiently, as well hybrid offline-online (HO2) leverages stochastic programming (CSP) offline based statistics, refines adapting online real-time velocity. Numerical results show our optimized better adapt various setups different target buoys’ topology speed/direction/variance compared benchmark schemes. In particular, proposed HO2 effectively random variations feasible robust operation, proactively exploit further savings single-buoy multi-buoy scenarios.