TARGET DENSITY FUNCTION FOR UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLES PLANNING

The main problem of special aerial reconnaissance is the contradiction between the dimensions of the survey area and the dimensions of elementary objects (targets). Since the viewing area is very large, the size of the target is small, and the instantaneous field of view of the on-board equipment is limited, the time for obtaining data is quite significant and the amount of information to be processed is very large. Also, due to technical limitations on the time spent in the air and the limitations of the reconnaissance equipment, one UAV is not able to cover the entire area in one flight. The severity of this problem can be partially removed by using a group of UAVs. but both for one person and for a group, the task of planning the route of movement arises. A simple comb survey of the reconnaissance zone is far from optimal, and in practice route planning is used by points with the involvement of a priori information about the most likely locations of targets. However, this method is rather inconvenient for the automatic route planning of the UAV itself, since the point on the map usually does not correlate with the flight height, the instantaneous field of view of the on-board surveillance equipment, the scale and detail of the picture. In order to increase the optimization possibilities of automatic flight planning, it is suggested to use the target distribution density function (TDF). The density function of the target distribution is a two-dimensional mathematical model that describes the conditional relative probability of finding targets at different points in space. It is created and set on the basis of a priori data about the terrain, previous observations or intellectual assessments, reflecting the distribution of possible targets in a certain area or for the entire reconnaissance area. TDF allows to model the space not as homogeneous, but as an area with different degrees of importance or probabilities of finding targets. It should be noted that obtaining mathematically justified or calculated by the theory of probability or mathematical statistics, two-dimensional discrete probability densities for randomly placed targets is actually impossible. Therefore, here the TDF is considered as an area with different degrees of review importance, which is reflected by conditional relative probabilities obtained from various sources, including expert evaluation.