Enhancements to patrolling operations based on Dubins' Traveling Salesman Problem

This paper aims to tackle the patrolling problem using Dubins' vehicles. Such vehicles are known to have significant kinematic constraints such as minimum-turning radius and the inability to move backward. In other words, they can only track planar curvature-bounded trajectories. This is more challenging than conventional patrolling problem because the Euclidean Traveling Salesmen Problem (ETSP) solution provides poor estimates of actual travel time and vehicle location in this case. The paper presents an extensive analytical framework, which includes theoretical derivations of upper bounds for the total travel distance of Dubins' vehicles and some enhancements to existing algorithms.