Zoning under Environmental Uncertainty: With Applications for Autonomous Vehicle Routing
Translated title
Zoning under Environmental Uncertainty
Authors
Rosenkrands, Kasper ; Pedersen, Casper Bak
Term
4. term
Education
Publication year
2022
Pages
45
Abstract
With the increasing size of wildfires (National Interagency Fire Center [21]) a need for effective ways of monitoring and containing the fires spread has emerged. The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for optical monitoring of a spreading wildfire is appropriate due to e.g., the longevity of missions and the hazardous environment. With the increasing size of fires more UAVs are needed to effectively monitor an area, leading to more potential conflicts between UAVs, thereby requiring the need for communication if a UAV were to deviate from its planned route. However there are many situations where communication between UAVs is not practical or even impossible. This project therefore explores zoning methods that will allow each agent to have navigational freedom while not needing to communicate in order to avoid conflicts. This problem is formulated as a 2-stage stochastic linear programming problem, that reflects the zoning and flight stage, where the environmental uncertainty during flight should be considered when constructing zones. This is solved using two zoning methods, inspired by the literature (Khemakhem et al. [18]) as well as a novel routing-based clustering method proposed by the authors. These are then compared using cumulative route scores for routes generated in the resulting zones. Their applicability for dynamic environments is further tested by considering how often each of the zoning solutions routes can be optimally updated while respecting zone boundaries. Lastly, the aforementioned zoning methods are compared with a traditional routing approach, in order to gauge performance degradation due to zone restriction
Keywords
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