Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Mission Planning

With recent advances in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology, UAVs are finding uses beyond their traditional “patrol drone” role. UAVs are increasingly valued as unmanned sensor platforms capable of performing imaging in a variety of domains. However, flight planning for UAVs is still an emerging discipline, and in practice is often performed by hand. We describe an automated planner and graphical user interface designed to assist an operator in mission planning for a single UAV imaging ground targets. Over time, the planner has evolved from a purely automated flight planner into a humansystem collaborative planning environment. The resulting software package is flexible and powerful, allowing many different degrees of human-system collaboration. The planner has been used to support NASA’s Western States Fire Missions and may also prove to be useful in many other domains.