CSC News

Best Paper Award Presented at IEEE Sarnoff Symposium

Congratulations to NC State Computer Science PhD student Angelyn Arputha Babu John on winning the Best Paper Award at the 38^th IEEE Sarnoff Symposium held in Newark, NJ on September 18-10, 2017.

The winning paper is titled “Cooperative Trajectory Planning in an Intercommunicating Group of UAVs for Convex Plume Wrapping.”  The abstract follows:

Trajectory planning in airborne networks is a primary application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) communication. The literature contains algorithms focusing on collision avoidance, intelligent task assignment and path planning among UAVs. Cooperative schemes exist in which the UAVs communicate with each other to reach a consensus on how each vehicle will take up one trajectory at a time efficiently based on its capability. In the last decade, much research is being done to use UAVs to track contamination in the environment, detect fires and even volcanic eruptions. As the plumes are constantly varying in space and time, there have to be efficient guidance algorithms for the UAVs in order to keep track of the shape of the plume. In this paper, we survey the literature to explore the currently available trajectory planning algorithms and also the few available plume tracking algorithms. We then formulate the Plume wrapping problem and propose a cooperative trajectory planning approach for a group of UAVs, through which the UAVs communicate their position estimates and planned trajectories to update each others trajectory to efficiently wrap around a plume region so that the contamination in the region can be studied.

Babu John is advised by Dr. Rudra Dutta.  To read the award-winning paper, click here.

~coates~