Abstract
In this paper we suggest an off-line/on-line path planner for cooperating unmanned vehicles that takes into account the mission objectives and constraints through an optimization procedure. The cooperating vehicles can be either Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs); these two categories of vehicles share common features as far as path planning is concerned and these features are used in this work for the development of a unified approach to the path planning problem over 3-D terrains. A number of unmanned vehicles of the same category are launched from the same or different known initial locations. The main issue is to produce 3-D trajectories (represented by 3-D B-Spline curves) that ensure a collision free path, respect the mission objectives and constraints, and guide the vehicles to a common final destination. The off-line planner is designed for known environments. The on-line one generates paths in unknown static environments, by exchanging acquired information from the cooperating vehicles’ on-board sensors. For each vehicle a near optimum path is generated that guides it safely to an intermediate position within the already scanned area. The process is repeated for each vehicle until the final destination is reached by one or more members of the team. Then, each one of the remaining vehicles can either turn into the off-line mode to reach the target, moving through the already scanned area, or continue with the on-line mode. Both off-line and on-line path planning problems are formulated as optimization problems, and a Differential Evolution algorithm is used as the optimizer.
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Nikolos, I.K., Tsourvelouds, N.C. (2009). Path Planning for Cooperating Unmanned Vehicles over 3-D Terrain. In: Filipe, J., Cetto, J.A., Ferrier, JL. (eds) Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 24. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85640-5_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85640-5_12
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