{"ID":2843133,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07822","arxiv_id":"2511.07822","title":"Occlusion-Aware Ground Target Search by a UAV in an Urban Environment","abstract":"This paper considers the problem of searching for a point of interest (POI) moving along an urban road network with an uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV). The UAV is modeled as a variable-speed Dubins vehicle with a line-of-sight sensor in an urban environment that may occlude the sensor's view of the POI. A search strategy is proposed that exploits a probabilistic visibility volume (VV) to plan its future motion with iterative deepening $A^\\ast$. The probabilistic VV is a time-varying three-dimensional representation of the sensing constraints for a particular distribution of the POI's state. To find the path most likely to view the POI, the planner uses a heuristic to optimistically estimate the probability of viewing the POI over a time horizon. The probabilistic VV is max-pooled to create a variable-timestep planner that reduces the search space and balances long-term and short-term planning. The proposed path planning method is compared to prior work with a Monte-Carlo simulation and is shown to outperform the baseline methods in cluttered environments when the UAV's sensor has a higher false alarm probability.","short_abstract":"This paper considers the problem of searching for a point of interest (POI) moving along an urban road network with an uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV). The UAV is modeled as a variable-speed Dubins vehicle with a line-of-sight sensor in an urban environment that may occlude the sensor's view of the POI. A search strategy...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07822","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07822v1","authors":"[\"Collin Hague\",\"Artur Wolek\"]","published":"2025-11-11T04:39:52Z","proceeding":"cs.RO","tasks":"[\"cs.RO\",\"eess.SY\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}