Privacy-Preserving Path-Planning for UAVs

Because of their potential ubiquity, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are often viewed as a threat to people’s privacy. However, the users of UAVs for applications such as package delivery can also have their own privacy compromised by observations of UAV behavior by an adversary. Hence, this paper looks at privacy-preserving path-planning for a UAV. In particular, we consider a UAV which is delivering a package or operating a service, e.g. a health-emergency service, for users while an adversary tries to infer the UAV’s destination by observing its trajectory. We consider two models for the UAV motion for which we provide privacy-preserving path-planning mechanisms (PPPMs) while taking into account the UAV’s energy consumption as well. We obtain the tradeoff between privacy and energy consumption guarantees and show that the proposed PPPMs not only satisfy the privacy guarantees but also meet the energy efficiency criteria.