Trajectory Planning for autonomous Unmanned Air Vehicles (Dept.E)

Abstract

Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) will be more lethal and strengthen the air force than the remotely-piloted platforms in use today. The new tendency is to implement it in combat missions. Among the many open issues in their development is that of trajectory planning (TP). This is a challenging problem for several reasons. The algorithm must compute a stealthy path, and minimizes a cost function The cost function is composed of : trajectory length and threat of adversarial sites which may be Radar Sites or Surface to Air Missiles (SAMs). This problem becomes more complicated if a UAV fleet is considered to attack multi targets simultaneously. A lot of techniques are reported for UAV TP such as : cell decomposition, road map, potential field and optimization techniques. Each one suffers from serious disadvantages such as: local minima, long computation time, the search for the optimal path can be NP – hard problem, and no guarantee to find an optimal (or near optimal) path. This paper explains a new methodology to generate a trajectory for a single UAV assigned for a specific target. This trajectory is chosen among all feasible trajectories (rom the UAV starting position to