Efficient unmanned aerial vehicle formation rendezvous trajectory planning using Dubins path and sequential convex programming. Issue 8 (3rd August 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Wang, Zhu; Liu, Li; Long, Teng; Xu, Guangtong
• Is Part Of: Engineering optimization. Volume 51:Issue 8(2019)
• Page Start: 1412
• Page End: 1429
• Publication Date: 2019-08-03
• Subjects: Unmanned aerial vehicle -- formation rendezvous -- trajectory optimization -- convex optimization; Engineering design -- Periodicals; Mathematical optimization -- Periodicals; 620.0042
• DOI: 10.1080/0305215X.2018.1524461
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0305-215X

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Trajectory planning of formation rendezvous of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is formulated as a mixed-integer optimal control problem, and an efficient hierarchical planning approach based on the Dubins path and sequential convex programming is proposed. The proposed method includes the assignment of rendezvous points (high level) and generation of cooperative trajectories (low level). At the high level, the assignment of rendezvous points to UAVs is optimized to minimize the total length of Dubins-path-based approximate trajectories. The assignment results determine the geometric relations between the UAVs' goals, which are used as equality constraints for generating trajectories. At the low level, trajectory generation is treated as a non-convex optimal control problem, which is transformed to a non-convex parameter optimization and then solved via sequentially performing convex optimization. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can generate feasible trajectories and can outperform a typical nonlinear programming method in terms of efficiency.