Proceedings of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) Conference, Montreal (August 2001)

The problem of optimal (or near-optimal) exhaustive search for a moving target is of importance in many civilian and military applications. Search-and-rescue in open sea or in sparsely-populated areas and search missions for previously-spotted enemy targets are just a few examples. Yet, few known algorithms exist for solving this problem and none of them combine the optimal allocation of search effort with the actual computation of trajectories that a searcher must (and physically can) follow. We propose a technique for exploiting the target spatial mobility constraints to derive accurate regions of interest. We also propose a technique for exploiting the geometric properties of a region of interest to decompose the overall search problem into a set of simpler search problems. The technique is both generalizable to multiple search agents and extensible in that additional real-life search requirements (maneuverability constraints, additional information about the sensor, etc.) can be incorporated into the existing framework. Another novelty of our approach is the ability to optimally deal with a search platform which, due to design constraints, can only perform detection while moving along straight-line sweeps.

For More Information

To learn more or request a copy of a paper (if available), contact info@cra.com.

(Please include your name, address, organization, and the paper reference. Requests without this information will not be honored.)