English

ARENA: Adaptive Risk-aware and Energy-efficient NAvigation for Multi-Objective 3D Infrastructure Inspection with a UAV

Robotics 2025-02-27 v1

Abstract

Autonomous robotic inspection missions require balancing multiple conflicting objectives while navigating near costly obstacles. Current multi-objective path planning (MOPP) methods struggle to adapt to evolving risks like localization errors, weather, battery state, and communication issues. This letter presents an Adaptive Risk-aware and Energy-efficient NAvigation (ARENA) MOPP approach for UAVs in complex 3D environments. Our method enables online trajectory adaptation by optimizing safety, time, and energy using 4D NURBS representation and a genetic-based algorithm to generate the Pareto front. A novel risk-aware voting algorithm ensures adaptivity. Simulations and real-world tests demonstrate the planner's ability to produce diverse, optimized trajectories covering 95% or more of the range defined by single-objective benchmarks and its ability to estimate power consumption with a mean error representing 14% of the full power range. The ARENA framework enhances UAV autonomy and reliability in critical, evolving 3D missions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2502.19401,
  title  = {ARENA: Adaptive Risk-aware and Energy-efficient NAvigation for Multi-Objective 3D Infrastructure Inspection with a UAV},
  author = {David-Alexandre Poissant and Alexis Lussier Desbiens and François Ferland and Louis Petit},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.19401},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

8 pages, 7 figures, submitted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:59:05.978Z