Routing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles While Considering General Restricted Operating Zones

Abstract

U.S. military forces employ unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to conduct intelligence-gathering missions worldwide. For a typical mission, commanders may task UAV operators to gather imagery on 100 or more sites or targets. UAV operators must quickly prepare mission plans that meet the needs of their commanders while dealing with real-world constraints such as time windows, site priorities, imagery requirements, UAVs with different capabilities (i.e. imagery equipment, speed, and range), and UAVs departing from different bases. Previous AFIT research provided the UAV Battlelab with a tool, AFIT Router, for generating high-quality routes to aid mission planning. This research enhances the AFIT Router by providing the ability to define general restricted operating zones and to build routes that consider these zones. This research also examines and compares a probabilistic tabu search heuristic and two reactive tabu search heuristics for solving vehicle routing problems.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 2001
Accession Number
ADA391265

Entities

People

  • Darin T. Brown

Organizations

  • Air Force Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Autonomy

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Aircrafts
  • Algorithms
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Collision Avoidance
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Engineering
  • Graphical User Interface
  • Ground Control Stations
  • Literature
  • Operations Research
  • Travel Time
  • Unmanned
  • Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
  • Video Games

Readers

  • Aerospace logistics and air mobility.
  • Computer Vision.
  • Robotics and Automation.

Technology Areas

  • Autonomy
  • Autonomy - UAVs