Guidance of autonomous amphibious vehicles for flood rescue support

Shankarachary Ragi, Chingseong Tan, Edwin K.P. Chong

Research output: Journal PublicationArticlepeer-review

6 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

We develop a path-planning algorithm to guide autonomous amphibious vehicles (AAVs) for flood rescue support missions. Specifically, we develop an algorithm to control multiple AAVs to reach/rescue multiple victims (also called targets) in a flood scenario in 2D, where the flood water flows across the scene and the targets move (drifted by the flood water) along the flood stream. A target is said to be rescued if an AAV lies within a circular region of a certain radius around the target. The goal is to control the AAVs such that each target gets rescued while optimizing a certain performance objective. The algorithm design is based on the theory of partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). In practice, POMDP problems are hard to solve exactly, so we use an approximation method called nominal belief-state optimization (NBO). We compare the performance of the NBO approach with a greedy approach.

Original languageEnglish
Article number528162
JournalMathematical Problems in Engineering
Volume2013
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2013
Externally publishedYes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Mathematics
  • General Engineering

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