Computational Modeling for Automatic Path Planning Based on Evaluations of the Effects of Impacts of UAVs on the Ground
There are several works that approach the modeling of navigation environments for the automatic planning of paths for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). However these works do not consider the evaluation of risks to the population in case of accidents with UAVs. The present work proposes a grid-based method to construct visibility graphs based on the evaluation of effects of impacts of UAVs on the ground and on a set of geographic information. The metric used for the evaluation is the minimum acceptable period between accidents of this type. The geographic information to be used consists of georeferenced images and digital elevation models of the surfaces of the navigation environments; urban and rural population density information of the cities in these environments; and the polygonal representation of the cities. The visibility graphs constructed by the proposed method allow the UAVs to plan the shortest paths with a decrease of the probability of fatalities due to accidents with impact of UAVs on the ground. Analyses of the results are presented in this work.
path planning unmanned aerial vehicle visibility graph digital elevation model uav ground impact binary grid