Optimization Dubins Path of Multiple UAVs for Post-Earthquake Rapid-Assessment

Zhu, Moning; Zhang, Xuehua; Luo, He; Wang, Guoqiang; Zhang, Binbin

doi:10.3390/app10041388

Cited by 15 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…The objective of the RNA stage is, similar to Balcik (2017), maximizing the minimum coverage ratio achieved among community groups, and the second objective is minimizing the maximum assessment time of all assessment teams. There is a stream of literature focusing on damage assessment using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which shows similarities to the needs assessment routing problem (e.g., Zhu et al 2019Zhu et al , 2020Glock and Meyer 2020). The main difference is that damage assessment studies focus mainly on settings where UAVs' high-quality pictures can meet the assessment purposes, and there is no possibility or necessity to conduct interviews with the community groups.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluation of field visit planning heuristics during rapid needs assessment in an uncertain post-disaster environment

et al. 2021

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A Rapid Needs Assessment process is carried out immediately after the onset of a disaster to investigate the disaster’s impact on affected communities, usually through field visits. Reviewing practical humanitarian guidelines reveals that there is a great need for decision support for field visit planning in order to utilize resources more efficiently at the time of great need. Furthermore, in practice, there is a tendency to use simple methods, rather than advanced solution methodologies and software; this is due to the lack of available computational tools and resources on the ground, lack of experienced technical staff, and also the chaotic nature of the post-disaster environment. We present simple heuristic algorithms inspired by the general procedure explained in practical humanitarian guidelines for site selection and routing decisions of the assessment teams while planning and executing the field visits. By simple, we mean methods that can be implemented by practitioners in the field using primary resources such as a paper map of the area and accessible software (e.g., Microsoft Excel). We test the performance of proposed heuristic algorithms, within a simulation environment , which enables us to incorporate various uncertain aspects of the post-disaster environment in the field, ranging from travel time and community assessment time to accessibility of sites and availability of community groups. We assess the performance of proposed heuristics based on real-world data from the 2011 Van earthquake in Turkey. Our results show that selecting sites based on an approximate knowledge of community groups’ existence leads to significantly better results than selecting sites randomly. In addition, updating initial routes while receiving more information also positively affects the performance of the field visit plan and leads to higher coverage of community groups than an alternative strategy where inaccessible sites and unavailable community groups are simply skipped and the initial plan is followed. Uncertainties in travel time and community assessment time adversely affect the community group coverage. In general, the performance of more sophisticated methods requiring more information deteriorates more than the performance of simple methods when the level of uncertainty increases.

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Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluation of field visit planning heuristics during rapid needs assessment in an uncertain post-disaster environment

et al. 2021

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“…There are six papers focused on the UAV path planning technology [13][14][15][16][17][18]. F. Yan, X. Zhu, Z. Zhou, and J. Chu present an empirical hierarchical mission planning to decouple and solve the simultaneous arrival of a multi-UAV coalition problem [13].…”

Section: Advanced Uav Technologiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Special Issue on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)

Jung

2020

Applied Sciences

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This editorial paper was a special issue of Applied Sciences belonging to the section of mechanical engineering in MDPI journal and summarized the collected manuscripts regarding the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) related technologies, including communication, control, collision avoidance, modeling, path planning, human-machine interface (HMI), artificial intelligence (AI), etc. Chronologically, this special issue was started to be coordinated at the end of Oct 2018, prepared for a month and opened to collect manuscripts from the middle of Nov 2018 until the end of Dec 2019. During almost a year, 26 papers were published online out of 50 submitted papers which results in 52% acceptance rate.

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“…One of the most effective categories of path planning techniques is based on geometrical methods, which can be implemented in real time due to their low computational burden. The most famous approach is probably the one based on Dubins' car [10][11][12][13][14], in which planned paths are made up as a sequence of straight lines and circular arcs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Path Planning and Real-Time Collision Avoidance Based on the Essential Visibility Graph

et al. 2020

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This paper deals with a novel procedure to generate optimum flight paths for multiple unmanned aircraft in the presence of obstacles and/or no-fly zones. A real-time collision avoidance algorithm solving the optimization problem as a minimum cost piecewise linear path search within the so-called Essential Visibility Graph (EVG) is first developed. Then, a re-planning procedure updating the EVG over a selected prediction time interval is proposed, accounting for the presence of multiple flying vehicles or movable obstacles. The use of Dubins curves allows obtaining smooth paths, compliant with flight mechanics constraints. In view of possible future applications in hybrid scenarios where both manned and unmanned aircraft share the airspace, visual flight rules compliant with International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Annex II Right of Way were implemented. An extensive campaign of numerical simulations was carried out to test the effectiveness of the proposed technique by setting different operational scenarios of increasing complexity. Results show that the algorithm is always able to identify trajectories compliant with ICAO rules for avoiding collisions and assuring a minimum safety distance as well. Furthermore, the low computational burden suggests that the proposed procedure can be considered a promising approach for real-time applications.

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Optimization Dubins Path of Multiple UAVs for Post-Earthquake Rapid-Assessment

Cited by 15 publications

References 43 publications

Evaluation of field visit planning heuristics during rapid needs assessment in an uncertain post-disaster environment

Evaluation of field visit planning heuristics during rapid needs assessment in an uncertain post-disaster environment

Special Issue on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)

Path Planning and Real-Time Collision Avoidance Based on the Essential Visibility Graph

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