Date of Award

6-2006

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Gary B. Lamont, PhD

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to design and implement a comprehensive mission planning system for swarms of autonomous aerial vehicles. The system integrates several problem domains including path planning, vehicle routing, and swarm behavior. The developed system consists of a parallel, multi-objective evolutionary algorithm-based path planner, a genetic algorithm-based vehicle router, and a parallel UAV swarm simulator. Each of the system's three primary components are developed on AFIT's Beowulf parallel computer clusters. Novel aspects of this research include: integrating terrain following technology into a swarm model as a means of detection avoidance, combining practical problems of path planning and routing into a comprehensive mission planning strategy, and the development of a swarm behavior model with path following capabilities.

AFIT Designator

AFIT-GCE-ENG-06-08

DTIC Accession Number

ADA454271

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