An autonomous path planning method for unmanned aerial vehicle based on a tangent intersection and target guidance strategy

• Main Authors: Liu, Huan, Li, Xiamiao, Fan, Mingfeng, Wu, Guohua, Pedrycz, Witold, Suganthan, Ponnuthurai Nagaratnam
• Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering; Elliptic Tangent Graph; Target Guidance
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/162964
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) path planning enables UAVs to avoid obstacles and reach the target efficiently. To generate high-quality paths without obstacle collision for UAVs, this article proposes a novel autonomous path planning algorithm based on a tangent intersection and target guidance strategy (APPATT). Guided by a target, the elliptic tangent graph method is used to generate two sub-paths, one of which is selected based on heuristic rules when confronting an obstacle. The UAV flies along the selected sub-path and repeatedly adjusts its flight path to avoid obstacles through this way until the collision-free path extends to the target. Considering the UAV kinematic constraints, the cubic B-spline curve is employed to smooth the waypoints for obtaining a feasible path. Compared with A∗, PRM, RRT and VFH, the experimental results show that APPATT can generate the shortest collision-free path within 0.05 seconds for each instance under static environments. Moreover, compared with VFH and RRTRW, APPATT can generate satisfactory collision-free paths under uncertain environments in a nearly real-time manner. It is worth noting that APPATT has the capability of escaping from simple traps within a reasonable time.