Autonomous Air–Ground Vehicle Operations Optimization in Hazardous Environments: A Multi-Armed Bandit Approach

Hazardous environments such as chemical spills, radiological zones, and biocontaminated sites pose significant threats to human safety and public infrastructure. Rapid and reliable hazard mitigation in these settings is often unsafe for humans, calling for autonomous systems that can adaptively sense and respond to evolving risks. This paper presents a decision-making framework for autonomous vehicle dispatch in hazardous environments with uncertain and evolving risk levels. The system integrates a Bayesian upper confidence bound (BUCB) sensing strategy with task-specific vehicle routing problems with profits (VRPPs), enabling adaptive coordination of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for hazard sensing and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) for cleaning. Using VRPPs allows selective site visits under resource constraints by assigning each site a visit value that reflects sensing or cleaning priorities. Site-level hazard beliefs are maintained through a time-weighted Bayesian update. BUCB scores guide UAV routing to balance exploration and exploitation under uncertainty, while UGV routes are optimized to maximize expected hazard reduction under resource constraints. Simulation results demonstrate that our framework reduces the number of dispatch cycles required to resolve hazards by around 30% on average compared to uninformed baseline dispatch strategies, underscoring the value of uncertainty-aware vehicle dispatch for reliable hazard mitigation.