Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 February 2017
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) represent a major advantage in defense, disaster relief and first responder applications. UAV may provide valuable information on the environment if their Command and Control (C2) is shared by different operators. In a C2 networking system, any operator may request and use the UAV to perform a remote sensing operation. These requests have to be scheduled in time and a consistent navigation plan must be defined for the UAV. Moreover, maximizing UAV utilization is a key challenge for user acceptance and operational efficiency. The global planning problem is constrained by the environment, targets to observe, user availability, mission duration and on-board resources. This problem follows previous research works on automatic mission Planning & Scheduling for defense applications. The paper presents a full constraint-based approach to simultaneously satisfy observation requests, and resolve navigation plans.