Three-dimensional path planning for unmanned aerial vehicle based on interfered fluid dynamical system

Abstract

This paper proposes a method for planning the three-dimensional path for low-flying unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in complex terrain based on interfered fluid dynamical system (IFDS) and the theory of obstacle avoidance by the flowing stream. With no requirement of solutions to fluid equations under complex boundary conditions, the proposed method is suitable for situations with complex terrain and different shapes of obstacles. Firstly, by transforming the mountains, radar and anti-aircraft fire in complex terrain into cylindrical, conical, spherical, parallelepiped obstacles and their combinations, the 3D low-flying path planning problem is turned into solving streamlines for obstacle avoidance by fluid flow. Secondly, on the basis of a unified mathematical expression of typical obstacle shapes including sphere, cylinder, cone and parallelepiped, the modulation matrix for interfered fluid dynamical system is constructed and 3D streamlines around a single obstacle are obtained. Solutions to streamlines with multiple obstacles are then derived using weighted average of the velocity field. Thirdly, extra control force method and virtual obstacle method are proposed to deal with the stagnation point and the case of obstacles' overlapping respectively. Finally, taking path length and flight height as sub-goals, genetic algorithm (GA) is used to obtain optimal 3D path under the maneuverability constraints of the UAV. Simulation results show that the environmental modeling is simple and the path is smooth and suitable for UAV. Theoretical proof is also presented to show that the proposed method has no effect on the characteristics of fluid avoiding obstacles. ª 2015 Production and hosting by Elsevier Ltd. on behalf of CSAA & BUAA.

Path Planning in Structured Environment using Harmonic Potential Fields via Block Iterative Method

“…By determining the inverse matrix of the coefficient matrix in equation (10), the general scheme of two point-block iterative method can be rewritten as (Evans [21,22]) Based on equation (11), the iterative scheme for the two point-block iterative method can be defined as (12) where It can be clearly observed in equation (12) that the calculations of ϕ (k+1) and ϕ (k+1) are completely independent. Thus, block iterative method is very suitable for parallel implementation.…”

“…Moreover, they offer a complete path planning algorithm, and paths derived from them are generally smooth. In the past, an exact method based on the HPFs were applied in many area of researches including ship navigation [5], trajectory control [6], space robot path planning [7], navigation of snake-like robot [8], UAV motion planning [9], marine vessel path planning [10], 3D motion planning for UAV [11,12], space exploration [13], etc. In robot navigation problem, the HPFs were successfully applied in various types of environments [14][15][16][17][18][19][20].…”

Drone Package Delivery: A Heuristic approach for UAVs path planning and tracking

“…On the other hand, the authors in [9] and [12 ] for unmanned aerial vehicles. The firs sol ution is based on interf ered f uid dynamic system, while the second approach uses linear progr amming where obstacle avoidance and targ et tracking are linearized to gener ate a linear progr amming model in a rela tiv e vel ocity space.…”

“…Now ada ys, the applica tion of UAV is extending from high-al titude fligh to very low-al titude, where the impact of the terr ain, the environmen t and the air traffic will be the key factors to be considered to avoid collisions [9]. How ev er, we do not aim to provide an exha ustiv e list but we will be limited to provide the most relev ant work rela ted to the pa th planning reg arding to the nature of the objectiv es, problems formaliza tion and resol ving methods.…”

Flight Reliability of Multi Rotor UAV Based on Genetic Algorithm

“…Therefore, different sensors are required to carry out the real-time measurement [7,8]. However, different sensors have different characteristics.…”