Task scheduling system for UAV operations in indoor environment

Abstract: Application of UAV in indoor environment is emerging nowadays due to the advancements in technology. UAV brings more space-flexibility in an occupied or hardly-accessible indoor environment, e.g., shop floor of manufacturing industry, greenhouse, nuclear powerplant. UAV helps in creating an autonomous manufacturing system by executing tasks with less human intervention in time-efficient manner. Consequently, a scheduler is one essential component to be focused on; yet the number of reported studies on UAV scheduling has been minimal. This work proposes a methodology with a heuristic (based on Earliest Available Time algorithm) which assigns tasks to UAVs with an objective of minimizing the makespan. In addition, a quick response towards uncertain events and a quick creation of new high-quality feasible schedule are needed. Hence, the proposed heuristic is incorporated with Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm to find a quick near optimal schedule. This proposed methodology is implemented into a scheduler and tested on a few scales of datasets generated based on a real flight demonstration. Performance evaluation of scheduler is discussed in detail and the best solution obtained from a selected set of parameters is reported.