A Staged Path Planner for an Unmanned Air System Performing Surveillance
Peter C. Niedfeldt, Brandon Carroll, Randal W. Beard, Stephen Pledgie · 2012
In search and rescue, target tracking, and other missions, Unmanned Air Systems (UASs) assist in accomplishing mission goals while minimizing risk to human personnel. By automating the planning process we can reduce the workload for UAS operators. This paper presents a novel staged path planner that autonomously computes the ight path of the UAS, the path of the sensor optical axis along the terrain, and the sensor zoom level by maximizing the probability of detection over a nite time horizon. These algorithms are used to precompute UAS and sensor paths for a surveillance mission over a speci ed region. Simulated and actual ight test results are included.