Autonomous Target Search with Multiple Coordinated UAVs
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Search and tracking is the problem of locating a moving target and following it to its destination. In this work, we consider a scenario in which the target moves across a large geographical area by following a road network and the search is performed by a team of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). We formulate search and tracking as a combinatorial optimization problem and prove that the objective function is submodular. We exploit this property to devise a greedy algorithm. Although this algorithm does not offer strong theoretical guarantees because of the presence of temporal constraints that limit the feasibility of the solutions, it presents remarkably good performance, especially when several UAVs are available for the mission. As the greedy algorithm suffers when resources are scarce, we investigate two alternative optimization techniques: Constraint Programming (CP) and AI planning. Both approaches struggle to cope with large problems, and so we strengthen them by leveraging the greedy algorithm. We use the greedy solution to warm start the CP model and to devise a domain-dependent heuristic for planning. Our extensive experimental evaluation studies the scalability of the different techniques and identifies the conditions under which one approach becomes preferable to the others.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it