An obstacle avoidance approach for UAV path planning

Abstract

The recent pandemic of COVID-19 has proven to be a test case for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). UAVs have shown great potential for plenty of applications in the face of this pandemic, but their scope of applications becomes limited due to the dependency on ground pilots. Irrespective of the application, it is imperative to have an autonomous path planning to utilize UAVs to their full potential. Collision-free trajectories are expected from the path planning process to ensure the safety of UAVs and humans on the ground. This work proposes a path planning technique where collision avoidance is mathematically proven under an uncertainty prerequisite, that the UAV follows its requested moving position within some threshold distance. This scheme ensures UAV safety by considering the underlying control’s system overshoots. Obstacles play a guiding role in selecting collision-free trajectories. These obstacles are modeled as rectangular shapes with interest points defined around their corners. These points further define collision-free permissible edges, and later we apply the Dijkstra algorithm to these edges before having the desired trajectory. Regardless of the size of deployment area, our proposed scheme incurs low computational load due to the dependency on pre-defined interest points only thereby making it suitable for real-time path planning. Simulation results obtained using MATLAB’s UAV Toolbox show that the proposed method succeeds in getting short collision-free trajectories.