A constraint-based approach for planning unmanned aerial vehicle activities

Christophe GUETTIER

Abstract:

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) represent a major advantage in defense, disaster relief and first
responder applications. UAV may provide valuable information on the environment if their Command
and Control (C2) is shared by different operators. In a C2 networking system, any operator may
request and use the UAV to perform a remote sensing operation. These requests have to be scheduled in
time and a consistent navigation plan must be defined for the UAV. Moreover, maximizing UAV utilization
is a key challenge for user acceptance and operational efficiency. The global planning problem is
constrained by the environment, targets to observe, user availability, mission duration and on-board
resources. This problem follows previous research works on automatic mission Planning & Scheduling
for defense applications. The paper presents a full constraint-based approach to simultaneously satisfy
observation requests, and resolve navigation plans.