Jointly optimize the number and locations of casualty-transfer switch points

Determine the jointly optimal number and locations of switch points for human–UGV casualty evacuation, rather than fixing the number of switch points to three, in order to minimize total mission time under heterogeneous human and UGV traversability constraints.

Background

The framework models casualty evacuation as a sequence of handoffs between a two-person human team and a Clearpath Warthog UGV. In the presented formulation, the number of handoffs is fixed at N=3, and only the spatial locations of those handoffs are optimized using mixed discrete particle swarm optimization.

Allowing the number of switch points to vary would produce a variable-cardinality optimization problem in which both the number of transfer events and their locations must be selected. This would enable the planner to determine whether additional or fewer handoffs improve evacuation time, but the paper does not address that joint optimization.

References

To mitigate this issue, we fix the number of switch points to $N=3$ in this work and optimize only their locations; jointly optimizing the number of switch points alongside their locations is left to future work.

— Traversability-Aware Cooperative Path Planning for Human-UGV Casualty Evacuation  (2610.06487 - Dalland et al., 5 Oct 2026) in Section IV, subsection “Switch Point Optimization”