Patrikar, Jay (Carnegie Mellon University), Dugar, Vishal (Carnegie Mellon University), Arcot, Vaibhav (University of Pennsylvania), Scherer, Sebastian (Carnegie Mellon University)

Real-Time Motion Planning of Curvature Continuous Trajectories for Urban UAV Operations in Wind

Scheduled for presentation during the Regular Session "Safety, Security & Reliability" (ThB2), Thursday, September 3, 2020, 16:00−16:20, Kozani

2020 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS), September 1-4, 2020 (Postponed from June 9-12, 2020), Athens, Greece

This information is tentative and subject to change. Compiled on April 19, 2024

Abstract

A key challenge in enabling autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to operate in cluttered urban environments is to plan collision-free, smooth, dynamically feasible trajectories between two locations with the wind in real-time. This paper presents a novel path planning strategy using sampling-based planning that uses a two-point boundary value problem (BVP) to connect states in the presence of wind. Unlike most approaches that use a curvature discontinuous solution, the proposed BVP is formulated as a nonlinear constrained optimization problem with curvature and curvature-rate continuous profile to generate smoother trajectories. To achieve real-time performance, our method uses surrogate solutions from a pre-calculated library while solving the planning problem and then runs a repair routine to generate the final trajectory. To validate the feasibility of the offline-online strategy, simulation results on a 3D model of an actual city block with a realistic wind-field are presented. Results with a trochoid-based BVP solver are also presented for comparison. For the given simulation scenario, we could demonstrate a 93 % success rate for the algorithm in finding a valid trajectory.