3D path planning and real-time collision resolution of multirotor drone operations in complex urban low-altitude airspace

• Main Authors: Zhang, Na, Zhang, Mingcheng, Low, Kin Huat
• Other Authors: School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: Engineering::Aeronautical engineering; Static Obstacles; Dynamic Threats
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/151289
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Drones have been greatly developed to facilitate the progress of various industries. The safe operation of drones in the urban airspace is critical to ensure a reliable and high-efficient urban air traffic system. This work presents a fusion scheme to achieve autonomous drone collision-free path planning considering static obstacles and dynamic threats detected. Firstly, a 3D voxel jump point search (JPS) based path planning model is developed to generate the static collision-free reference path. With the optimization, the reference path is then de-diagonalized, recon- structed, and smoothed to obtain the desired path. Subsequently, a local collision resolution method is proposed to avoid near mid-air collision of the dynamic threats. The method is based on the Markov decision process (MDP) to implement real-time dynamic collision avoidance. Simu- lations are conducted to verify the performance of the proposed model. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed model is effective to achieve the autonomous path planning and real-time collision resolution of multirotor drones.