Energy-Aware Autonomy for Air Vehicles

Application of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) represent a growing military and commercial sector that has the potential to revolutionize package delivery, search and rescue, surveillance, strike operations, and transportation.  Critical bottlenecks to realizing the benefits of these diverse and capable platforms are extending their endurance through optimization of energy utilization and improving the efficiency with which human operators can manage groups of these assets.  PC Krause and Associates (PCKA) proposes to address these bottlenecks by developing the Resource Aware Mission Planner (RAMP).  RAMP will automate optimization of both the task assignment and route planning problems for groups of heterogenous UAS’s to generate mission plans which maximize endurance and robustness.  Here, task assignment refers to the discrete sequence of actions the UAS is commanded to perform, and the route planning problem is determining the path and speed the vehicle traverses while executing the task plan.  RAMP will augment methods for solving these problems with energy-based constraint, heuristics, and metrics, enabling them to converge to energy-aware solutions quickly and efficiently.