A macrogrid approach for routing UAVs in support of information gathering

I n this work, we propose a method for determining the best ingress and egress points and time allocations for a series of linked unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) routing instances, to maximize global information gain across all routes within an area of operation (AO). The AO is decomposed into a network of macrocells similar to standardized geocoordinate systems such as the Military Grid Reference System. The macrocells are further partitioned into a series of microcells, which represent numerically valued areas of surveillance interest which effectively become potential waypoints for the UAV. Given a sequence of macrocells for a time-constrained intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) mission, a series of heuristics are used to generate and score potential ingress and egress points which serve as an input to a mathematical allocation model to determine a set of parameters that improves global information collection. The full-factorial study conducted on the allocation model revealed the sensitivity of the solution quality and solve time due to the size of the time allocation set for each macrocell. A comparison of the scoring methods on moderately sized problems, each requiring 1,000 score values on the information gain potential, is presented.