Risk-aware navigation for UAV digital data collection

<p>This thesis studies the navigation task for autonomous UAVs to collect digital data in a risky environment. Three problem formulations are proposed according to different real-world situations. First, we focus on uniform probabilistic risk and assume UAV has unlimited amount of energy. With these assumptions, we provide the graph-based Data-collecting Robot Problem (DRP) model, and propose heuristic planning solutions that consist of a clustering step and a tour building step. Experiments show our methods provide high-quality solutions with high expected reward. Second, we investigate non-uniform probabilistic risk and limited energy capacity of UAV. We present the Data-collection Problem (DCP) to model the task. DCP is a grid-based Markov decision process, and we utilize reinforcement learning with a deep Ensemble Navigation Network (ENN) to tackle the problem. Given four simple navigation algorithms and some additional heuristic information, ENN is able to find improved solutions. Finally, we consider the risk in the form of an opponent and limited energy capacity of UAV, for which we resort to the Data-collection Game (DCG) model. DCG is a grid-based two-player stochastic game where the opponent may have different strategies. We propose opponent modeling to improve data-collection efficiency, design four deep neural networks that model the opponent's behavior at different levels, and empirically prove that explicit opponent modeling with a dedicated network provides superior performance.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Year

2017

Author dc:creator

• Xing, Zhi

Contributors dc:contributor

• Jae C. Oh

• Ensemble Method
• Heuristic
• Navigation
• Opponent Modeling
• Reinforcement Learning
• Risk
• Engineering

Repository record dc:identifier

https://surface.syr.edu/etd/776

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:surface.syr.edu:etd-1777