Communication-Aware UAV Path Planning

Autonomous air drones, known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), often carry out missions with real-time video streaming. In this work, we address the off-line mission plan problem of computing the optimal path from an origin to a final destination in two-dimensional space in order to maximize the quality of the communication, given a cellular coverage, and thus to provide throughput guarantees to the video streaming. In addressing the problem, we consider the energy budget constraint, the presence of wind in the area and the path smoothing problem. We propose novel path planning algorithms that are shown to outperform classical approaches that are oblivious of communication network coverage

Modeling Urban Environments for Communication-Aware UAV Swarm Path Planning

Presented at the AIAA Modeling and Simulation Technologies Conference, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, August, 2010.The presented work introduces a graph based approach to model urban (or otherwise cluttered) environments for UAS utilization beyond line-of-sight as well as out of direct R/F range of the operator's control station. Making the assumption that some a priori data of the environment is available, the proposed method uses a classification of obstacles with respect to their impact on UAV motion and R/F communication and generates continuously updateable graphs usable to compute traverseable paths for UAVs while maintaining R/F communication. Using a simulated urban scenario this work shows that the proposed modeling method allows to find reachable loiter or hover areas for UAVs in order to establish a multi-hop R/F communication link between a primary UAV and its remote operator by utilizing an overlay of motion (Voronoi based) and R/F (visibility based) specific mapping methods