Oil spills boundary tracking using Universal Kriging and Model Predictive Control by UAV

In this paper, Universal Kriging (UK) technology combined with Model Predictive Control (MPC) algorithm is exploited to estimate the unknown situation of oil dispersion for just one unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to predict and track the objective boundary automatically. The advantage of the Kriging method is that it is an optimal interpolator in the sense that the estimates are unbiased and the minimum variance is known, so that it can relatively accurately construct the environment map. In addition, the advantage of the MPC is its constraint handling capacity. These two uncorrelated technologies, however, can be combined to realize some special functions. The simulation based on an advection diffusion equation demonstrates the proposed method is feasible and effective.