Using On-line Simulation for Adaptive Path Planning of UAVs

In a surveillance mission, the task of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) path planning can in some cases be addressed using Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) simulation. If sufficient a priori information about the target and the environment is available an assessment of the future state of the target is obtained by the SMC simulation. This assessment is used in a set of "what-if" simulations to compare different alternative UAV paths. In a static environment this simulation can be conducted prior to the mission. However, if the environment is dynamic, it is required to run the "what-if" simulations on-line i.e. in real-time. In this paper the details of this on-line simulation approach in UAV path planning is studied and its performance is compared with two other methods: an off-line simulationaided path planning and an exhaustive search method. The conducted simulations indicate that the on-line simulation has generally a higher performance compared with the two other methods.