Abstract: Earthquakes often lead to communication interruptions, so it is an important task in disaster relief to establish and restore a stable and reliable communication network quickly. UAVs can serve as mobile relays for rapid networking across geographical constraints. Therefore, this paper studies the allocation problem of relay UAVs in disaster areas during unsaturated rescue periods based on group role assignment. A communication network with a minimum spanning tree is constructed and the optimal task assignment is conducted through group role assignment. However, due to the limitations of mechanical and electrical characteristics, there are horizontal and vertical errors during UAVs’ flight, leading to that the straight-line flight distance cannot be used as the main basis for model evaluation. To this end, this paper designs an efficient greedy backtracking algorithm with the objective of minimizing the number of error corrections, solving the flight trajectories of UAVs. Based on it, a cost matrix is established. Experimental results show that the flight trajectory planning and assignment algorithms are efficient and reliable based on the group role assignment modeling system. It can effectively and accurately deploy the communication network, which can give an important support for UAVs to serve as mobile relays in disaster relief.

Key words: earthquake disaster relief, relay unmanned aerial vehicles, role-based collaboration, group role assignment (GRA), flight trajectory planning