Autonomous UAV Surveillance in Complex Urban Environments

We address the problem of multi-UAV surveillance in complex urban environments with occlusions. The problem consists of coordinating the flight of UAVs with on-board cameras so that the coverage and recency of the information about a designated area is maximized. In contrast to the existing work, sensing constraints due to occlusions and UAV flight constraints are modeled realistically and taken into account. We propose a novel occlusion-aware surveillance algorithm based on a decomposition of the surveillance problem into a variant of the three-dimensional art gallery problem and the multi-traveling salesmen problem for Dubins vehicles. The algorithm is thoroughly evaluated on the high-fidelity AGENTFLY UAV simulation testbed which accurately models all constraints and effects involved. The results confirm the importance of occlusion-aware flight path planning, in particular in the case of narrow street areas and low UAV flight altitudes.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: IAT
• Authors: Eduard Semsch, Michal Jakob, Dusan Pavlícek, Michal Pechoucek
• Keywords: IAT 2009, Intelligent Agent, Multi-traveling Salesmen Problem, UAV flight, UAV flight Constraints