GAINESVILLE:  Dr. Sivakumar Rathinam, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University will deliver a seminar on Thursday September 29, 2011 at 3:00 in room 307 Weil Hall entitled “Primal-Dual Algorithms for Routing a Collection of Heterogeneous Unmanned Vehicles.”

Heterogeneous unmanned vehicles with motion constraints are commonly used in surveillance applications for monitoring and tracking a set of targets. In this talk, we consider a basic routing problem involving multiple heterogeneous vehicles starting from distinct depots and a set of targets. The objective is to find a tour for each vehicle such that each target is visited by at least one vehicle and the sum of the travel times of all the vehicles is minimized. We present a primal-dual algorithm for this routing problem which provides an approximation ratio of 2.