Minimum-time approach to obstacle avoidance constrained by envelope protection for autonomous UAVs

摘要

An integrated approach is needed for combining path planning for obstacle avoidance with envelop protection to ensure that a UAV is operated within its safe operational limits while maneuvering in obstacle fields. This paper presents a minimum-time approach to this problem by treating obstacle avoidance and envelope protection as inequality constraints in a state space formulation. The approach is used to study the guidance of a rotary wing UAV for aggressive maneuvering in avoiding an obstacle while staying within its operational envelope. The Nonlinear Trajectory Generator (NTG) is used as a real-time optimization solver, and load factor and rotor flapping angle are considered as limit parameters. A nonlinear simulation model of a rotary wing test bed within the Georgia Tech Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Simulation Tool (GUST) is used to evaluate the proposed approach.