Incorporating weather systems in cooperative UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) search: A probabilistic approach

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been recently used in many areas due to their ability to perform almost as efficiently as piloted aircrafts, at low cost, without endangering human life. In this research, we consider a fleet of UAVs performing a search mission in a bounded area where static targets are located. The search strategy is a cooperative one, rather than a centralized one due to low bandwidth and dynamics in the system. Cooperation has been noted in the literature to be very important for multi-vehicle control systems such as the one considered in this research. Our solution method is a Dynamic Programming (DP) algorithm for computing the trajectories of multiple UAVs from a mission starting point with the objective of cooperatively searching the set of fixed targets. The algorithm presented in this research calculates a gain function for maximizing the number of targets found in the area. Each vehicle maintains a (dynamic) cognitive map of probabilities of indicating where the targets are likely to exist and where other vehicles have already been routed. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...