Automated UAV tasks for search and surveillance

There is growing interest in using unmanned aerial vehicles to assist in operations that require search and surveillance. However, a challenge remains in providing the right level of automation. Manual teleoperation and waypoint-based planning provide a great deal of flexibility but require significant human effort, whereas high levels of automation reduce the level of human effort but at the cost of flexibility and human judgement in uncertain and dynamic environments. Here, we seek to provide an intermediate level of automation through a set of parameterized tasks that implement common UAV search and surveillance patterns, taking into account low-level details such as dynamics of the UAV, geometry of the sensor footprint, and quality of the sensor imagery. We describe implementation of these tasks and discuss how they can be used by either human operators or by higher levels of automation to plan search and surveillance missions.