Cooperative Search Using Human-UAV Teams
Chang Liu, J. Karl Hedrick · 2016
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely adopted for autonomously conducting search missions in recent decade. Due to the limited capabilities of UAVs, including human partners in the search process is promising to tackle many realistic applications that mere UAVs are not sufficient to deal with. This paper presents a collaboration scheme using a human-UAV team to cooperatively localize a stationary missing target. To achieve efficient collaboration, Bayesian inverse planning approach is utilized for inferring the goal area that human plans to search. By incorporating the inferred human goal into a model predictive control-based path planning framework, the UAV is able to design effective search path to assist in localizing the target in the human’s goal area. The proposed scheme is evaluated on a simulated target search scenario.