Robustness for Scalable Autonomous UAV Operations
Sunghun Jung, Kartik B. Ariyur · International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences · 2017
Automated mission planning for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is difficult because of the propagation of several sources of error into the solution, as for any large scale autonomous system. To ensure reliable system performance, we quantify all sources of error and their propagation through a mission planner for operation of UAVs in an obstacle rich environment we developed in prior work. In this sequel to that work, we show that the mission planner developed before can be made robust to errors arising from the mapping, sensing, actuation, and environmental disturbances through creating systematic buffers around obstacles using the calculations of uncertainty propagation. This robustness makes the mission planner truly autonomous and scalable to many UAVs without human intervention. We illustrate with simulation results for trajectory generation of multiple UAVs in a surveillance problem in an urban environment while optimizing for either maximal flight time or minimal fuel consumption. Our solution methods are suitable for any well-mapped region, and the final collision free paths are obtained through offline sub-optimal solution of an mTSP (multiple traveling salesman problem).