Abstract

Autonomous unmanned air vehicle flight control systems require robust path generation to account for terrain obstructions, weather, and moving threats such as radar, jammers, and unfriendly aircraft. In this paper, we outline a feasible, hierarchal approach for real-time motion planning of small autonomous fixed-wing UAVs. The approach divides the trajectory generation into four tasks: waypoint path planning, dynamic trajectory smoothing, trajectory tracking, and low-level autopilot compensation. The waypoint path planner determines the vehicle 's route without regard for the dynamic constraints of the vehicle. This results in a significant reduction in the path search space, enabling the generation of complicated paths that account for pop-up and dynamically moving threats. Kinematic constraints are satisfied using a trajectory smoother which has the same kinematic structure as the physical vehicle. The third step of the approach uses a novel tracking algorithm to generate a feasible state trajectory that can be followed by a standard autopilot. Monte-Carlo simulations were done to analyze the performance and feasibility of the approach and determine real-time computation requirements. A planar version of the algorithm has also been implemented and tested in a low-cost micro-controller. The paper describes a custom UAV built to test the algorithms.

Citations