Unmanned Ariel Vehicle (UAV) Path Planning for Area Segmentation in Intelligent Landmine Detection Systems

Abstract

Landmine contamination is a significant problem that has devastating consequences worldwide. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can play an important role in solving this problem. The technology has the potential to expedite, simplify, and improve the safety and efficacy of the landmine detection process prior to physical intervention. Although the process of detecting landmines in contaminated environments is systematic, it is proven to be rather costly and overwhelming, especially if prior information about the location of the lethal objects is unknown. Therefore, automation of the process to orchestrate the search for landmines has become necessary to utilize the full potential of system components, particularly the UAV, which is the enabling technology used to airborne the sensors required in the discovery stage. UAVs have a limited amount of power at their disposal. Due to the complexity of target locations, the coverage route for UAV-based surveys must be meticulously designed to optimize resource usage and accomplish complete coverage. This study presents a framework for autonomous UAV-based landmine detection to determine the coverage route for scanning the target area. It is performed by extracting the area of interest using segmentation based on deep learning and then constructing the coverage route plan for the aerial survey. Multiple coverage path patterns are used to identify the ideal UAV route. The effectiveness of the suggested framework is evaluated using several target areas of differing sizes and complexities.