Emergency Landing Aware Surveillance Planning for Fixed-wing Planes

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce the Emergency Landing Aware Surveillance Planning (ELASP) problem that stands to find the shortest feasible trajectory to visit a given set of locations while considering a loss of thrust may happen to the vehicle at any time. Two main challenges can be identified in ELASP. First, the ELASP is a planning problem to determine a feasible close-loop trajectory visiting all given locations such that the total trajectory length is minimized, which is a variant of the traveling salesman problem. The second challenge arises from the safety constraints to determine the cost-efficient trajectory such that its altitude is sufficiently high to guarantee a gliding emergency landing to a nearby airport from any point of the trajectory. Methods to address these challenges individually already exist, but the proposed approach enables to combine the existing methods to address both challenges at the same time and returns a safe, feasible, and cost-efficient multi-goal trajectory for the curvature-constrained vehicle.