Dynamic Motion Planning for Aerial Surveillance on a Fixed-Wing UAV

We present an efficient path planning algorithm for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle surveying a cluttered urban landscape. A special emphasis is on maximizing area surveyed while adhering to constraints of the UAV and partially known and updating environment. A Voronoi bias is introduced in the probabilistic roadmap building phase to identify certain critical milestones for maximal surveillance of the search space. A kinematically feasible but coarse tour connecting these milestones is generated by the global path planner. A local path planner then generates smooth motion primitives between consecutive nodes of the global path based on UAV as a Dubins vehicle and taking into account any impending obstacles. A Markov Decision Process (MDP) models the control policy for the UAV and determines the optimal action to be undertaken for evading the obstacles in the vicinity with minimal deviation from current path. The efficacy of the proposed algorithm is evaluated in an updating simulation environment with dynamic and static obstacles.Comment: Accepted at International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems 201

Approximating Nearest Neighbor Distances

Several researchers proposed using non-Euclidean metrics on point sets in Euclidean space for clustering noisy data. Almost always, a distance function is desired that recognizes the closeness of the points in the same cluster, even if the Euclidean cluster diameter is large. Therefore, it is preferred to assign smaller costs to the paths that stay close to the input points. In this paper, we consider the most natural metric with this property, which we call the nearest neighbor metric. Given a point set P and a path $\gamma$, our metric charges each point of $\gamma$ with its distance to P. The total charge along $\gamma$ determines its nearest neighbor length, which is formally defined as the integral of the distance to the input points along the curve. We describe a $(3+\varepsilon)$-approximation algorithm and a $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation algorithm to compute the nearest neighbor metric. Both approximation algorithms work in near-linear time. The former uses shortest paths on a sparse graph using only the input points. The latter uses a sparse sample of the ambient space, to find good approximate geodesic paths.Comment: corrected author nam

Exact Geosedics and Shortest Paths on Polyhedral Surface

We present two algorithms for computing distances along a non-convex polyhedral surface. The first algorithm computes exact minimal-geodesic distances and the second algorithm combines these distances to compute exact shortest-path distances along the surface. Both algorithms have been extended to compute the exact minimalgeodesic paths and shortest paths. These algorithms have been implemented and validated on surfaces for which the correct solutions are known, in order to verify the accuracy and to measure the run-time performance, which is cubic or less for each algorithm. The exact-distance computations carried out by these algorithms are feasible for large-scale surfaces containing tens of thousands of vertices, and are a necessary component of near-isometric surface flattening methods that accurately transform curved manifolds into flat representations.National Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (R01 EB001550

Resilient Backhaul Network Design Using Hybrid Radio/Free-Space Optical Technology

The radio-frequency (RF) technology is a scalable solution for the backhaul planning. However, its performance is limited in terms of data rate and latency. Free Space Optical (FSO) backhaul, on the other hand, offers a higher data rate but is sensitive to weather conditions. To combine the advantages of RF and FSO backhauls, this paper proposes a cost-efficient backhaul network using the hybrid RF/FSO technology. To ensure a resilient backhaul, the paper imposes a given degree of redundancy by connecting each node through $K$ link-disjoint paths so as to cope with potential link failures. Hence, the network planning problem considered in this paper is the one of minimizing the total deployment cost by choosing the appropriate link type, i.e., either hybrid RF/FSO or optical fiber (OF), between each couple of base-stations while guaranteeing $K$ link-disjoint connections, a data rate target, and a reliability threshold. The paper solves the problem using graph theory techniques. It reformulates the problem as a maximum weight clique problem in the planning graph, under a specified realistic assumption about the cost of OF and hybrid RF/FSO links. Simulation results show the cost of the different planning and suggest that the proposed heuristic solution has a close-to-optimal performance for a significant gain in computation complexity