Intelligent water drops for aerospace and defense applications

Abstract

A modified version of the intelligent water drop algorithm for performing planning for air and ground robots based on telemetry provided by satellites has been created. The IWD algorithm works by simulating the flow of water drops in a stream-network, dynamically adapting drop and network characteristics. This paper presents the base IWD algorithm, a simplified version of the algorithm (SIWD) and a derivative of this simplified version that has been adapted and applied to planning air and ground robot paths based upon orbital (for aerial) and aerial (for ground) imagery. An analysis of the performance of the algorithm is presented.