Multidisciplinary Approach to Intelligent Unmanned-Airborne-Vehicles Mission Planning

Abstract

The increasing popularity of unmanned airborne vehicles (UAVs) has led to a greater desire to deploy UAVs within civilian airspace. Previous UAV platforms have possessed a limited degree of onboard intelligence. Consequently these UAVs have been constrained to operations within restricted areas or constantly supervision by a human operator. These previous approaches have not enabled the full potential of UAVs to be exploited. The onboard intelligence of UAVs needs to be increased to fully unlock their potential. This paper focuses upon increasing the UAVs onboard intelligence in one specific area, namely, mission planning. Onboard planning techniques have been developed for UAVs in the past. However, the previous approaches have not considered civilian airspace applications and as a result have not been suitable for these applications. This paper presents a novel multidisciplinary approach to onboard UAV mission planning, which combines robotics and three-dimensional graphics techniques. The paper will describe the development of the multidisciplinary approach and its application to mission planning for UAV operations in civilian airspace. Specific optimizations that have been made for the civilian airspace problem will be discussed. Results will be presented based upon testing scenarios built using real-world airspace and terrain information from southeast Queensland, Australia. These results will prove the higher performance and operational freedom achieved by this new approach compared to previous approaches.