Pythagorean Hodograph (PH) Path Planning for Tracking Airborne Contaminant using Sensor Swarm

This paper presents results on the path planning of cooperating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to detect, model and track the shape of airborne contaminants boundary using Pythagorean hodograph (PH). The model of the contaminant boundary is based on SCIPUFF and used it as reference for the path planning to track the airborne contaminant. The UAVs sensor swarm has to take measurements of the air borne contaminant clouds. The UAVs are assumed to just have a sensor package which can sense nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) contaminants. Therefore as a UAVs flies through the contaminant the NBC sensors will recognise the entry and exit points of the UAVs from the contaminant boundary and give these two points as measurements. Based on the measurements the splinegon approach uses to predict the contaminant boundary and produces a segment for the next UAVs path.