Optimal Path Planning for Unmanned Aircraft Target Observation Through Constrained Urban Environments

摘要

The work herein determines the optimal flight path for a small unmanned aircraft system through a constrainedurban environment. The implementation of unavoidable keep-out regions is evaluated by first solving the optimalflight path through a constrained simplex corridor and, second, minimizing incursions to keep-out regions given thesame constraint field and ending on a defined orbit around a target of interest. Direct orthogonal collocation methodsare combined with fast geometric path planning techniques where a triangulated mesh is used to produce a hybridcontrol routine, resulting in optimal flight paths through a defined triangulated corridor. Physical constraints areeliminated from the nonlinear program search space, while keep-out regions are modeled within the objectivefunction of the optimal control problem and avoided according to a weighted distribution of the objective components.A scenario is presented for a small unmanned aircraft system to advance at constant altitude and constant speedthrough city building constraints while minimizing time in unavoidable keep-out regions. The path terminates outsidethe triangulated corridor on an orbit, encircling the target location. Results illustrate an optimal path solutionthrough 37 polygonal constraints and 2 nonlinear, unavoidable keep-out regions with computational times on theorder of 90 s.