Patent ID: 8620510

Claim:
A mission planning system for determining an optimum use of a plurality of vehicles in searching a predefined geographic area, said system comprising: a discretizer subsystem including hardware and software components, configured to use sensing capabilities of each said vehicle to produce a point set defining a number of points within the predefined geographic area that said vehicles must traverse to completely search the predefined geographic area, the number of points taking into consideration a topography of the predefined geographic area and weather conditions affecting visibility in the predefined geographic area during the searching, and coordinates of areas of impeded visibility within the predefined geographic area; a task allocator subsystem including a second hardware component and a second software component running on the second hardware component, configured to determine an optimum division of the predefined geographic area into different subregions to be handled by specific ones of said vehicles based on the point sets produced by said discretizer subsystem, to minimize an overall time needed to search the predefined geographic area region by said vehicles; a path optimizer subsystem including hardware and software components, for determining an optimum path, for each one of said vehicles through a particular subregion determined by said task allocator subsystem to be handled by said one of said vehicles to minimize the time needed to traverse said particular subregion; and an arbitrator subsystem that determines needed changes to the subregions to be handled by each of said vehicles based upon changes to both an operational status of each said vehicle and changing environmental conditions within said predefined geographic area.