Trajectory planning for unmanned aerial vehicles: a network optimization approach

This paper presents a new approach for trajectory planning of air vehicles. It considers scenarios with risk areas and forbidden zones and takes into account the maneuverability of the air vehicle. It is flexible as to allow different kinds of objective functions such as minimizing risk, flight path length or flight time, and allows to implement constraints on fuel consumption or other resources. Additionally, it can incorporate waypoints to be passed by the air vehicle with or without specified overflight directions. The method includes planning of one-way and return trips. The underlying model is based on a discretization of the airspace into a non-regular network. Every path in the network corresponds to a flyable trajectory which means that the trajectory is within the performance limits of the air vehicle. The generation of the network is done non-deterministically. One of the main benefits of the model is that one can make use of standard network optimization techniques.