Persistent visitation under revisit constraints

Abstract

This work is motivated by persistent Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) missions, where an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is to perpetually fly over a number of unidentified objects within a given search area and classify the objects based on information collected. The aspects of the problem pertaining to the collection of information and classification are abstracted into a revisit rate for each object of interest which, if respected, yields proper classification. The problem of finding paths that meet these revisit rate requirements is treated and periodicity properties of solutions to the path planning problem are derived. Furthermore, heuristics to solve this problem are presented and, through numerical simulations, the effectiveness of the method is illustrated.