Leveraging Public Buses To Relay UAVs For On-demand Applications

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are widely employed in smart city. However, the limited battery capacity is one of the UAV's most critical obstacles to monitoring mission. Recently, leveraging public buses to relay UAVs has been shown to be a promising solution to this critical issue. Existing works on this solution focused on pre-determined scenarios, namely the mission time and location of the UAVs are determined in advance. While in on-demand mission such as emergency response, mission time and location of the UAV is on-demand and stochastic. How the UAV riding on a bus perform in such stochastic missions remains open. In this paper, driven by the bus mobility data, a sampling-based algorithm is designed to navigate UAVs to land on buses in on-demand applications. A simple greedy algorithm is proposed to determine the appropriate buses to relay UAVs, so that the scheduling performance of the UAVs is optimized. Comprehensive evaluation using a large-scale bus trajectory data is conducted.