3 research outputs found
Planning Visual Inspection Tours for a 3D Dubins Airplane Model in an Urban Environment
This paper investigates the problem of planning a minimum-length tour for a
three-dimensional Dubins airplane model to visually inspect a series of targets
located on the ground or exterior surface of objects in an urban environment.
Objects are 2.5D extruded polygons representing buildings or other structures.
A visibility volume defines the set of admissible (occlusion-free) viewing
locations for each target that satisfy feasible airspace and imaging
constraints. The Dubins traveling salesperson problem with neighborhoods
(DTSPN) is extended to three dimensions with visibility volumes that are
approximated by triangular meshes. Four sampling algorithms are proposed for
sampling vehicle configurations within each visibility volume to define
vertices of the underlying DTSPN. Additionally, a heuristic approach is
proposed to improve computation time by approximating edge costs of the 3D
Dubins airplane with a lower bound that is used to solve for a sequence of
viewing locations. The viewing locations are then assigned pitch and heading
angles based on their relative geometry. The proposed sampling methods and
heuristics are compared through a Monte-Carlo experiment that simulates view
planning tours over a realistic urban environment.Comment: 18 pages, 10 figures, Presented at 2023 SciTech Intelligent Systems
in Guidance Navigation and Control conferenc
Optimal UAS Assignments and Trajectories for Persistent Surveillance and Data Collection from a Wireless Sensor Network
This research developed a method for multiple Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) to efficiently collect data from a Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). WSN are composed of any number of fixed, ground-based sensors that collect and upload local environmental data to over flying UAS. The three-step method first uniquely assigns aircraft to specific sensors on the ground. Second, an efficient flight path is calculated to minimize the aircraft flight time required to verify their assigned sensors. Finally, sensors reporting relatively higher rates of local environmental activity are re-assigned to dedicated aircraft tasked with concentrating on only those sensors. This work was sponsored by the Air Force Research Laboratory, Control Sciences branch, at Wright Patterson AFB. Based on simulated scenarios and preliminary flight tests, optimal flight paths resulted in a 14 to 32 reduction in flight time and distance when compared to traditional flight planning methods