Across many rescue, surveillance, and scientific applications, there exists a broad need to perform wide-area reconnaissance and terrain surveys for which unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly popular. This thesis considers the task of using one or more UAVs to locate an object of interest, provide continuous viewing, and rapidly re-acquire tracking should it be lost for any reason. For both the common class of small field-launched UAVs as well as larger UAVs, this is a difficult task due to a small available sensor field of view, uncertain estimates of UAV pose, and limited maneuverability relative to the scale of the environment, requiring constant processing of observations and recomputation of flight paths or sensor aiming to best find the object or keep it in view. Existing strategies for accomplishing this provide poor estimates of the object's location and rely on grossly heuristic or computationally intensive trajectory generation for both pursuit and search. This thesis proposes careful representation of observation uncertainty and exploitation of environmental structure -- with a particular focus on road networks typical of urban-like areas -- as a means to simplify and better model the problem. For the case of actively tracked objects, greatly improved location estimates are demonstrated through filter representations designed for high-uncertainty observations, and improved pursuit performance is achieved by modeling terrain-constrained space reduction in object location and motion. Objects having no or only a roughly known prior location require an initial search, for which both classical Bayesian probabilistic search and novel road network coverage strategies are considered. Finally, this is extended to search and local recapture of evasive adversaries in road networks through novel mappings of pursuit-evasion tactics that are well-studied in abstract or ground- based domains, but have yet to see use in aerial applications.
Search and Pursuit with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Road Networks
2013
230 pages
Report
No indication
English
Aircraft , Computers, Control & Information Theory , Military Intelligence , Detection & Countermeasures , Robotics/Robots , Computer Software , Road Transportation , Aerial reconnaissance , Drones , Moving targets , Position finding , Pursuit courses , Roads , Searching , Tracking , Area coverage , Bayes theorem , Computer vision , Evasion , Mapping , Observation , Robotics , Surface targets , Target detection , Terrain intelligence , Theses , Uncertainty , Urban areas , Road networks , Small unmanned aerial vehicles , Micro air vehicles , Target tracking , Target geolocation , Location estimates , Observation uncertainty , Pursuit performance , Bayesian estimation , Evasive targets , Adversarial targets , Visual tracking , Evidence-grid filters , Range-bearing particle filters , Over-parameterized bounded filters , Limited-maneuverability , Target recapture , Bounded-speed targets , Natural terrain constraints
A pursuit-evasion game between unmanned aerial vehicles
IEEE | 2014
|Problems of search and pursuit of unmanned aerial vehicles using the game-theoretic approach
ArXiv | 2023
|Coordinating an aerial search among unmanned aerial vehicles
European Patent Office | 2024
|Optical Search by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Wiley | 2016
|