A hierarchical flight planner for sensor-driven UAV missions

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly becoming economical platforms for carrying a variety of sensors. Building flight plans that place sensors properly, temporally and spatially, is difficult. The goal of sensor-driven planning is to automatically generate flight plans based on desired sensor placement and temporal constraints. We present a hierarchical sensor-driven flight planning system capable of generating 2D flights that satisfy desired sensor placement and complex timing and dependency constraints. The system makes use of several well-known planning algorithms and includes a user interface. Results demonstrate that the algorithm is general enough for use by a human in several simulated wilderness search and rescue scenarios.