Fuzzy Multi-Objective Mission Flight Planning in Unmanned Aerial Systems

This paper discusses the development of a multi-objective mission flight planning algorithm for unmanned aerial system (UAS) operations within the National Airspace System (NAS). Existing methods for multi-objective planning are largely confined to two dimensional searches and/or acyclic graphs in deterministic environments; many are computationally infeasible for large state spaces. In this paper, a multi-objective fuzzy logic decision maker is used to augment the D* Lite graph search algorithm in finding a near optimal path. This not only enables evaluation and trade-off between multiple objectives when choosing a path in three dimensional space, but also allows for the modelling of data uncertainty. A case study scenario is developed to illustrate the performance of a number of different algorithms. It is shown that a fuzzy multi-objective mission flight planner provides a viable method for embedding human expert knowledge in a computationally feasible algorithm