UGV-Conditioned Multi-UAV Informative Planning on a Shared Exposure Belief

2026-06-10

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenge of ensuring path safety for unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) operating in unknown threat environments by proposing an air-ground collaborative reconnaissance framework. The approach introduces a shared exposure belief model that is constructed and continuously updated online to guide multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) toward sensing the regions most critical to UGV safety. Key innovations include the formulation of the shared exposure belief, an information-driven strategy for spatial task allocation among UAVs, and a dynamic replanning mechanism for the UGV. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to a baseline system ignoring threats, the proposed method reduces the UGV’s cumulative exposure risk by 38%. Furthermore, multi-UAV coordination significantly minimizes redundant observations, decreasing coverage redundancy from 38.8% to 3.7%.

Abstract

Safe ground navigation in large, threat-augmented environments requires aerial support that actively reduces the risks that a ground vehicle faces along its route. Existing aerial reconnaissance systems focus on mapping or covering the environment, but do not direct sensing toward regions that are most relevant for ground vehicle safety. In this paper, we address the problem of coordinating a team of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to improve the safety of an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) navigating through unknown threat zones. A key aspect of our approach is a shared exposure belief that is updated online from aerial observations and used jointly by the UAV team and the ground vehicle. This enables us to direct aerial sensing towards route-relevant regions while allowing the UGV to replan around newly revealed threats. We coordinate the UAV team through spatial region assignment to avoid redundant sensing. Simulation experiments show that our approach reduces cumulative UGV exposure by 38% compared to a system that does not account for hazard levels, and reduces redundant aerial coverage from 38.8% to 3.7% under our multi-UAV coordination scheme.

Problem

• UGV safety
• multi-UAV coordination
• threat-aware planning
• aerial reconnaissance
• exposure reduction

Innovation

• shared exposure belief
• multi-UAV coordination
• informative planning
• UGV safety
• online belief update