Planning of Diverse Trajectories

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are more and more often used to solve different tasks in both the private and the public sector. Some of these tasks can often be performed completely autonomously while others are still dependent on remote pilots. They control an UAV using a command display where they can control it manually using joysticks or give it a simple task. The command display allow for the planning of the UAV trajectory through waypoints while avoiding no-fly zones. Nevertheless, the operator can be aware of other preferences or soft restrictions for which it’s not feasible to be inserted into the system especially during time critical tasks. We propose to provide the operator with several different alternative trajectories, so he can choose the best one for the current situation. In this contribution we propose several metrics to measure the diversity of the trajectories. Then we explore several algorithms for the alternative trajectories creation. Experimental results in two grid domains show how the proposed algorithms perform.

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