Abstract
In the mining industry, smart surveying and exploration operations for the minerals are essential during mining missions. Usually, these missions are performed in remote areas that do not have a wireless communications infrastructure. This paper proposes to use the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as a relay communication node between the exploration team and the ground control station (GCs). UAV can act as a relay node to provide mobile, flexible, and reliable communication links in remote environments and complex topologies. In this work, the pathloss models in millimeter-wave technology are considered because they provide massive data rates for line of sight scenarios. The optimization problem of identifying a 3D location and trajectory of the UAV relay node is formulated to maximize the total team members’ data rate. Because the problem is non-convex, the particle swarm optimization algorithm is used to solve it and determine an efficient location and trajectory of the UAV.