DragFly: Joint Threat Object Detection And UAV Trajectory Planning in Hostile Environments

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have a wide range of capacities, including surveillance, rescue missions, geographi-cal mapping, and military uses. This work focuses on combining computer vision with route planning methods, namely DragFly, to ensure the safety of a UAV throughout its whole flying mission to a designated target. We use an advanced object detection algorithm to precisely identify the locations of obstacles and create an accurate geographical map. Two path-planning algorithms are introduced to improve flying safety. We enhance the A* algorithm to include searching in hazardous areas, allowing the UAV to stay a safe distance away from dangers such as anti-drones and preserve communication. Furthermore, our tangent point approach may provide extremely fast searching performance in small to medium map sizes. The evaluation results demonstrate that our approach can locate the shortest path in just 31.66 milliseconds without compromising safety.