Formation Trajectory Planning and Realization of multi-UAVs

Abstract

With the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) 's mission changing from simple aerial photography to more complex tasks, trajectory planning has become a hot research topic. With the increase of the UAV missions’ complexity, single UAV is often limited to energy and load constraints and then cannot complete the task well. So we need multi-UAVs to perform tasks at the same time when multi-UAVs formation trajectory planning has become an important problem to be solved. In order to solve this problem, we propose a method for formation trajectory planning based on Bezier curve. Firstly, based on the distance constraint among multi-UAVs, we conduct an initial trajectory planning. And according to the velocity and the minimum turning radius constraint conditions, we use Bezier curve to replan existing initial trajectory to satisfy above constraints, and achieve UAV formation trajectory planning finally. Then, we build a flight experiment platform, and the performance of the proposed planning method is analyzed from velocity, acceleration, minimum turning radius and distance among UAVs. The experimental results show that the trajectory planning method proposed in this paper can plan the formation trajectory which satisfies the above constraints well, so as to achieve a smooth and reliable flight effect.