Integrated Exploration-Aware UAV Route Optimization and Path Planning

Abstract: Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used for exploration-driven monitoring in hazardous environments such as disaster zones, contaminated sites, wildfire areas, and damaged infrastructure, where limited flight endurance must be allocated between visiting reported locations and gathering new information. In these settings, prior information regarding hazards is often incomplete, spatially imprecise, and subject to change during execution. For example, initial reports may identify a region where a hazard is likely to exist, but the actual hazard may be displaced, partially observed, or entirely unreported. We present an integrated exploration-aware UAV route optimization and path planning framework for hazard monitoring under uncertain and evolving prior information. The environment is represented as a spatial risk map, where each location has an associated belief of hazardous conditions. Reported hazards are modeled as uncertain regions of interest (ROIs) rather than confirmed target locations, requiring the UAV to inspect reported areas while also using its limited flight endurance to explore informative regions. The proposed method solves a vehicle routing problem over reported ROIs, augments the route with auxiliary pseudo-nodes to improve spatial coverage, allocates the remaining flight distance budget across route segments, and optimizes dynamically feasible B-spline trajectories for local exploration. During execution, UAV measurements update a grid-based belief map, and the remaining trajectory is replanned when new information and the remaining budget justify adaptation. Across 48 scenario configurations, online replanning improves average KL reduction by 15.9% over the offline optimized planner and 48.6% over straight-line traversal.