Efficient unmanned aerial vehicle formation rendezvous trajectory planning using Dubins path and sequential convex programming

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Unmanned aerial vehicle
• formation rendezvous
• trajectory optimization
• convex optimization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Zhu Wang http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3691-1407

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation [number 2018M631361] and the National Natural Science Foundation of China [number 51675047].