Compressed UAV sensing for flood monitoring by solving the continuous travelling salesman problem over hyperspectral maps

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have shown great capability for disaster management due to their fast speed, automated deployment and low maintenance requirements. In recent years, disasters such as flooding are having increasingly damaging societal and environmental effects. To reduce their impact, real-time and reliable flood monitoring and prevention strategies are required. The limited battery life of small lightweight UAVs imposes efficient strategies to subsample the sensing field. This paper proposes a novel solution to maximise the number of inspected flooded cells while keeping the travelled distance bounded. Our proposal solves the so-called continuous Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP), where the costs of travelling from one cell to another depend not only on the distance, but also on the presence of water. To determine the optimal path between checkpoints, we employ the fast sweeping algorithm using a cost function defined from hyperspectral satellite maps identifying flooded regions. Preliminary results using MODIS flood maps show that our UAV planning strategy achieves a covered flooded surface approximately 4 times greater for the same travelled distance when compared to the conventional TSP solution. These results show new insights on the use of hyperspectral imagery acquired from UAVs to monitor water resources