UAV Routing in a Stochastic, Time-Varying Environment

Authors:	Frazzoli Emilio, Univ. of California, Los Angeles, United States Enright John J., Univ. of California, Los Angeles, United States
Topic:	7.3 Aerospace
Session:	Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Keywords:	Algorithms; Aircraft control; Autonomous vehicles; Mobile robots

Abstract

In this paper we consider the following problem. An Uninhabited AerialVehicle (UAV), modeled as a vehicle moving at unit speed along pathsof bounded curvature, must visit stochastically-generated targets in aconvex, compact region Q of the plane. Targets aregenerated according to a spatio-temporal Poisson process, uniformly inQ. It is desired to minimize the expected waiting timebetween the appearance of a target, and the time it is visited. Wepresent algorithms for UAV routing, and compare their performance withrespect to asymptotic performance bounds, in the light and heavy loadlimits. Simulation results are presented and discussed.