UAV Mission Planning Resistant to Weather Uncertainty

Sensors (Basel). 2020 Jan 16;20(2):515. doi: 10.3390/s20020515.

Abstract

Fleet mission planning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is the process of creating flight plans for a specific set of objectives and typically over a time period. Due to the increasing focus on the usage of large UAVs, a key challenge is to conduct mission planning addressing changing weather conditions, collision avoidance, and energy constraints specific to these types of UAVs. This paper presents a declarative approach for solving the complex mission planning resistant to weather uncertainty. The approach has been tested on several examples, analyzing how customer satisfaction is influenced by different values of the mission parameters, such as the fleet size, travel distance, wind direction, and wind speed. Computational experiments show the results that allow assessing alternative strategies of UAV mission planning.

Keywords: UAV fleet mission planning; UAV routing and scheduling; Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.