Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, are widely used in civilian and defense applications, such as search and rescue operations, monitoring and surveillance, and aerial photography. This dissertation focuses on autonomous UAVs for tracking mobile ground targets. Our approach builds on optimization-based artificial intelligence for path planning by calculating approximately optimal trajectories. This approach poses a number of challenges, including the need to search over large solution spaces in real-time. To address these challenges, we adopt a technique involving a rapidly-exploring random tree (RRT) and Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS). The RRT technique increases in computational cost as we increase the number of mobile targets and the complexity of the dynamics. Our MCTS approach executes a tree search based on random sampling to generate trajectories in real time. We develop a variant of MCTS for online path-planning to track ground targets together with an associated algorithm called P-UAV. Our algorithm is based on the framework of partially observable Monte Carlo planning, originally developed in the context of MCTS for Markov decision processes. Our real-time approach exploits a parallel-computing strategy with a heuristic random-sampling process. In our framework, We explicitly incorporate threat evasion, obstacle collision avoidance, and resilience to wind. The approach embodies an exploration-exploitation tradeoff in seeking a near-optimal solution in spite of the huge search space. We provide simulation results to demonstrate the effectiveness of our path-planning method.

Adviser: Prof. Edwin K.P. Chong
Co-Adviser: -
Non-ECE Member: Prof. Olivier Pinaud
Member 3: Prof. Mahmood Azimi-Sadjadi
Addional Members: Prof. Ali Pezeshki

Publications:
1.A. Vasutapituks and E. K. P. Chong, ”Design of Autonomous UAV Guidance
System Using Monte Carlo Tree Search,” Proceedings of the 2022 7th International Conference
on Business and Industrial Research (ICBIR), Bangkok, Thailand, 2022, pp.
677-682.
2.A. Vasutapituks and E. K. P. Chong, ” An Autonomous UAV Path-Planning Algorithm for Mobile Target
Tracking in Complex Environments,” Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting in Mathematics 2023 (AMM 2023) and
International Conference in Number Theory and Applications 2023 (ICNA 2023), Bangkok, Thailand, 2023, pp.
105-115.

Program of Study:
ECE-520 Optimization Methods-Control and Communication
ECE-513 Digital Image Processing
ECE-656 Neural Networks and Adaptive Systems
ECE-514 Applications of Random Processes
ECE-681A1 Algebraic Coding Theory
ECE-516 Information Theory
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