AN APPROACH TO CREATING A MATHEMATICAL LANDSCAPE MODEL CONSIDERING KEY TERRAIN CHARACTERISTICS

Abstract

Modern Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) missions can be complex, requiring navigation over diverse landscapes in both urban settings (e.g., accounting for building heights) and natural environments (e.g., considering the elevations of mountains, hills, valleys, and forests), while also factoring in high-risk zones. The efficiency of path planning using common algorithms, along with the assessment of potential performance metrics (such as energy consumption, the number of target waypoints, and the requirements for visual observation in specialized missions), necessitates the development of an initial flight scenario and route plan. This allows for preliminary evaluations of the UAV mission plan. This article reviews established approaches to representing terrain in a mathematical models suitable for use with well-known routing algorithms. Furthermore, it proposes an original approach to representing the landscape of arbitrary terrain in the form of a specialized weighted graph. Keywords: mathematical landscape modeling, UAV path planning, multi-criteria optimization, weighted graph models, digital terrain models (DTM), UAV trajectory optimization.