# Dynamic Motion Planning for Aerial Surveillance on a Fixed-Wing UAV

## TL;DR

This paper introduces an efficient, adaptive path planning algorithm for fixed-wing UAVs conducting urban surveillance, integrating global and local planning with obstacle avoidance to maximize surveyed area.

## Contribution

It combines Voronoi bias, global coarse routing, local motion primitives, and MDP-based obstacle avoidance for improved UAV surveillance in complex environments.

## Key findings

- Effective in cluttered urban landscapes
- Maximizes surveyed area while avoiding obstacles
- Adapts to dynamic and static obstacles in simulation

## Abstract

We present an efficient path planning algorithm for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle surveying a cluttered urban landscape. A special emphasis is on maximizing area surveyed while adhering to constraints of the UAV and partially known and updating environment. A Voronoi bias is introduced in the probabilistic roadmap building phase to identify certain critical milestones for maximal surveillance of the search space. A kinematically feasible but coarse tour connecting these milestones is generated by the global path planner. A local path planner then generates smooth motion primitives between consecutive nodes of the global path based on UAV as a Dubins vehicle and taking into account any impending obstacles. A Markov Decision Process (MDP) models the control policy for the UAV and determines the optimal action to be undertaken for evading the obstacles in the vicinity with minimal deviation from current path. The efficacy of the proposed algorithm is evaluated in an updating simulation environment with dynamic and static obstacles.