Online 3D path planning for Tri-copter drone using GWO-IBA algorithm

Robots at present are involved in many parts of life, especially mobile robots, which are two parts, ground robots and flying robots, and the best example of a flying robot is the drone. Path planning is a fundamental part of UAVs because the drone follows the path that leads it to goal with obstacle avoidance. Therefore, this paper proposes a hybrid algorithm (grey wolf optimization - intelligent bug algorithm GWO-IBA) to determine the best, shortest and without obstacles path. The hybrid algorithm was implemented and tested in the MATLAB program on the Tri-copter model, and it gave different paths in different environments. The paths obtained were characterized by being free of obstacles and the shortest paths available to reach the target

LAVAPilot: Lightweight UAV Trajectory Planner with Situational Awareness for Embedded Autonomy to Track and Locate Radio-tags

Tracking and locating radio-tagged wildlife is a labor-intensive and time-consuming task necessary in wildlife conservation. In this article, we focus on the problem of achieving embedded autonomy for a resource-limited aerial robot for the task capable of avoiding undesirable disturbances to wildlife. We employ a lightweight sensor system capable of simultaneous (noisy) measurements of radio signal strength information from multiple tags for estimating object locations. We formulate a new lightweight task-based trajectory planning method-LAVAPilot-with a greedy evaluation strategy and a void functional formulation to achieve situational awareness to maintain a safe distance from objects of interest. Conceptually, we embed our intuition of moving closer to reduce the uncertainty of measurements into LAVAPilot instead of employing a computationally intensive information gain based planning strategy. We employ LAVAPilot and the sensor to build a lightweight aerial robot platform with fully embedded autonomy for jointly tracking and planning to track and locate multiple VHF radio collar tags used by conservation biologists. Using extensive Monte Carlo simulation-based experiments, implementations on a single board compute module, and field experiments using an aerial robot platform with multiple VHF radio collar tags, we evaluate our joint planning and tracking algorithms. Further, we compare our method with other information-based planning methods with and without situational awareness to demonstrate the effectiveness of our robot executing LAVAPilot. Our experiments demonstrate that LAVAPilot significantly reduces (by 98.5%) the computational cost of planning to enable real-time planning decisions whilst achieving similar localization accuracy of objects compared to information gain based planning methods, albeit taking a slightly longer time to complete a mission.Comment: Accepted to 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS

Online UAV path planning for joint detection and tracking of multiple radio-tagged objects

We consider the problem of online path planning for joint detection and tracking of multiple unknown radio-tagged objects. This is a necessary task for gathering spatio-temporal information using UAVs with on-board sensors in a range of monitoring applications. In this paper, we propose an online path planning algorithm with joint detection and tracking because signal measurements from these objects are inherently noisy. We derive a partially observable Markov decision process with a random finite set track-before-detect (TBD) multi-object filter, which also maintains a safe distance between the UAV and the objects of interest using a void probability constraint. We show that, in practice, the multi-object likelihood function of raw signals received by the UAV in the time-frequency domain is separable and results in a numerically efficient multi-object TBD filter. We derive a TBD filter with a jump Markov system to accommodate maneuvering objects capable of switching between different dynamic modes. Our evaluations demonstrate the capability of the proposed approach to handle multiple radio-tagged objects subject to birth, death, and motion modes. Moreover, this online planning method with the TBD-based filter outperforms its detection-based counterparts in detection and tracking, especially in low signal-to-noise ratio environments.Hoa Van Nguyen, Hamid Rezatofighi, Ba-Ngu Vo, and Damith C. Ranasingh