Occlusion-Aware Ground Target Search by a UAV in an Urban Environment

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Hague, Collin, Wolek, Artur
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866911259051425792
author Hague, Collin
Wolek, Artur
author_facet Hague, Collin
Wolek, Artur
contents This paper considers the problem of searching for a point of interest (POI) moving along an urban road network with an uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV). The UAV is modeled as a variable-speed Dubins vehicle with a line-of-sight sensor in an urban environment that may occlude the sensor's view of the POI. A search strategy is proposed that exploits a probabilistic visibility volume (VV) to plan its future motion with iterative deepening $A^\ast$. The probabilistic VV is a time-varying three-dimensional representation of the sensing constraints for a particular distribution of the POI's state. To find the path most likely to view the POI, the planner uses a heuristic to optimistically estimate the probability of viewing the POI over a time horizon. The probabilistic VV is max-pooled to create a variable-timestep planner that reduces the search space and balances long-term and short-term planning. The proposed path planning method is compared to prior work with a Monte-Carlo simulation and is shown to outperform the baseline methods in cluttered environments when the UAV's sensor has a higher false alarm probability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_07822
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Occlusion-Aware Ground Target Search by a UAV in an Urban Environment
Hague, Collin
Wolek, Artur
Robotics
Systems and Control
This paper considers the problem of searching for a point of interest (POI) moving along an urban road network with an uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV). The UAV is modeled as a variable-speed Dubins vehicle with a line-of-sight sensor in an urban environment that may occlude the sensor's view of the POI. A search strategy is proposed that exploits a probabilistic visibility volume (VV) to plan its future motion with iterative deepening $A^\ast$. The probabilistic VV is a time-varying three-dimensional representation of the sensing constraints for a particular distribution of the POI's state. To find the path most likely to view the POI, the planner uses a heuristic to optimistically estimate the probability of viewing the POI over a time horizon. The probabilistic VV is max-pooled to create a variable-timestep planner that reduces the search space and balances long-term and short-term planning. The proposed path planning method is compared to prior work with a Monte-Carlo simulation and is shown to outperform the baseline methods in cluttered environments when the UAV's sensor has a higher false alarm probability.
title Occlusion-Aware Ground Target Search by a UAV in an Urban Environment
topic Robotics
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07822