Dual ground target monitoring with unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of path planning for fixed wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for monitoring two different ground targets simultaneously. The UAVs are modelled as Dubins vehicles that can move only in the forward direction and are constrained by a bound on the minimum turn radius. The problem is formulated as an optimal control problem with both control and state inequality constraints along with a terminal manifold constraint. Subsequently, time optimal paths for the UAVs are obtained using Pontryagin's minimum principle.