Planning search and rescue missions for UAV teams

Abstract

The coordination of multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to carry out aerial surveys is a major challenge for emergency responders. In particular, UAVs have to fly over kilometre-scale areas while trying to discover casualties as quickly as possible. To aid in this process, it is desirable to exploit the increasing availability of data about a disaster from sources such as crowd reports, satellite remote sensing, or manned reconnaissance. In particular, such information can be a valuable resource to drive the planning of UAV flight paths over a space in order to discover people who are in danger. However challenges of computational tractability remain when planning over the very large action spaces that result. To overcome these, we introduce the survivor discovery problem and present as our solution, the first example of a continuous factored coordinated Monte Carlo tree search algorithm. Our evaluation against state of the art benchmarks show that our algorithm, Co-CMCTS, is able to localise more casualties faster than standard approaches by 7% or more on simulations with real-world data.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Gopal Ramchurn: orcid.org/0000-0001-9686-4302

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