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When operating autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in real environments it is necessary to deal with the effects of wind that causes the aircraft to drift in a certain direction. In such conditions it is hard or even impossible for UAVs with a bounded turning rate to follow certain trajectories. We designed a method based on an Accelerated A* algorithm that allows the trajectory planner to take the wind effects into account and to generate states that are reachable by UAV. This method was tested on hardware UAV and the reachability of its generated trajectories was compared to the trajectories computed by the original Accelerated A*.

Data collection missions are one of the many effective use cases of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), where the UAV is required to visit a predefined set of target locations to retrieve data. However, the flight time of a real UAV is time constrained, and therefore only a limited number of target locations can typically be visited within the mission. In this paper, we address the data collection planning problem called the Dubins Orienteering Problem with Neighborhoods (DOPN), which sets out to determine the sequence of visits to the most rewarding subset of target locations, each with an associated reward, within a given travel budget. The objective of the DOPN is thus to maximize the sum of the rewards collected from the visited target locations using a budget constrained path between predefined starting and ending locations. The variant of the orienteering problem addressed here uses curvature-constrained Dubins vehicle model for planning the data collection missions for UAV. Moreover, in the DOPN, it is also assumed that the data, and thus the reward, may be collected from a close neighborhood sensing distance around the target locations, e.g., taking a snapshot by an onboard camera with a wide field of view, or using a sensor with a long range. We propose a novel approach based on the Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) metaheuristic for the DOPN, in which combinatorial optimization of the sequence for visiting the target locations is simultaneously addressed with continuous optimization for finding Dubins vehicle waypoints inside the neighborhoods of the visited targets. The proposed VNS-based DOPN algorithm is evaluated in numerous benchmark instances, and the results show that it significantly outperforms the existing methods in both solution quality and computational time. The practical deployability of the proposed approach is experimentally verified in a data collection scenario with a real hexarotor UAV.

The herein studied problem is motivated by practical needs of our participation in the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC) 2017 in which a team of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is requested to collect objects in the given area as quickly as possible and score according to the rewards associated with the objects. The mission time is limited, and the most time‐consuming operation is the collection of the objects themselves. Therefore, we address the problem to quickly identify the most valuable objects as surveillance planning with curvature‐constrained trajectories. The problem is formulated as a multivehicle variant of the Dubins traveling salesman problem with neighborhoods (DTSPN). Based on the evaluation of existing approaches to the DTSPN, we propose to use unsupervised learning to find satisfiable solutions with low computational requirements. Moreover, the flexibility of unsupervised learning allows considering trajectory parametrization that better fits the motion constraints of the utilized hexacopters that are not limited by the minimal turning radius as the Dubins vehicle. We propose to use Bézier curves to exploit the maximal vehicle velocity and acceleration limits. Besides, we further generalize the proposed approach to 3D surveillance planning. We report on evaluation results of the developed algorithms and experimental verification of the planned trajectories using the real UAVs utilized in our participation in MBZIRC 2017.