Time-Critical Maritime UAV Mission Planning Using a Neural Network: An Operational View

An operational planning procedure for a time-critical maritime unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) search mission is introduced and evaluated. The mission is the fast identification of a target vessel. The triggering report only contains information regarding the category and displacement of a vessel carrying out a prohibited activity, resembling operational situations. A neural network trained to classify vessels is combined with vessel clustering to reduce waypoints in the flight plan. The UAV’s onboard sensors provide input for the neural network regarding each vessel in the search area, resulting in a prioritization of vessels to be visited. As the accuracy of the classification and the possibilities for clustering depend on several operational factors as well as on the UAV’s sensor degradation, we investigate three methodologies to identify which planning procedure to use in various operational situations. The results show that our robust and agile approach can help a UAV find the unknown target vessel as soon as possible.