UAV Trajectory Optimization for Sensing Exploiting Target Location Distribution Map

Abstract

In this paper, we study the trajectory optimization of a cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) which aims to sense the location of a target while maintaining satisfactory communication quality with the ground base stations (GBSs). In contrast to most existing works which assumed the target's location is known, we focus on a more challenging scenario where the exact location of the target to be sensed is unknown and random, while its distribution is known a priori and stored in a novel target location distribution map. Based on this map, the probability for the UAV to successfully sense the target can be expressed as a function of the UAV's trajectory. We aim to optimize the UAV's trajectory between two pre-determined locations to maximize the overall sensing probability during its flight, subject to a GBS-UAV communication quality constraint at each time instant and a maximum mission completion time constraint. Despite the non-convexity and NP-hardness of this problem, we devise three high-quality suboptimal solutions tailored for it with polynomial complexity. Numerical results show that our proposed designs outperform various benchmark schemes.