Title: Coordinated path planning of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) for maritime monitoring
Speaker: Ms. Qingying He (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
Date: May 28, 2026 (Thursday)
Time: 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Venue: Tam Wing Fan Innovation Wing Two, HKU
Registration Link: https://forms.office.com/r/YuBwcqw9y2
ITS Student Committee will provide a beverage for registered participants.
Abstract: Maritime monitoring often involves dispersed tasks over open water, where fixed support infrastructure is limited and costly to deploy and maintain. UAVs provide fast aerial sensing, while USVs can operate for longer periods and support UAV launch, recovery, and energy replenishment. The key planning challenge is to coordinate UAV sorties and USV routes so that monitoring tasks and launch--recovery operations remain feasible. This talk presents optimization models and scalable algorithms for UAV--USV coordinated path planning. The study starts from a deterministic setting, where coordination and synchronization are captured through a mixed-integer linear programming model and solved by customized exact and heuristic algorithms. It then considers travel time uncertainty caused by weather, waves, and currents, and develops a robust optimization framework to improve synchronization reliability. It further addresses real-time planning with imperfect operational information, where a cluster-wise robust optimization method is used to update decisions while accounting for heterogeneous forecast errors. Numerical experiments in the context of Guangdong--Hong Kong--Macao Greater Bay Area show that the proposed methods are effective, computationally efficient, and reliable under uncertainty. The framework provides a practical decision-support tool for operating heterogeneous autonomous systems in uncertain maritime environments.
Bios: Qingying He is currently a PhD candidate at the Department of Aeronautical and Aviation Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, under the supervision of Prof. Wei Liu. She holds a BSc in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics from Northeastern University and an MSc in Computational Mathematical Finance (with Distinction) from University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on transportation network modeling, optimization, and data-driven decision-making, with an emphasis on multi-modal coordination across unmanned aerial, surface, and ground vehicles. Her research has been published in world-leading journals in the field, such as TR Part B, TR Part E, IEEE T-ITS and Transportmetrica B.
