The Research Of Path Planning Based On Velocity Vector Field

With the development of UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) technology, the path planning, especially real-time planning, is playing a more important role in UAV's fight control system. A real-time planning technology base on velocity vector field which used in local planner is presented in this paper. The main contributions are summarized as follows:According to requirements of path planning, the scheme is firstly put forward in this paper. Combined with the algorithm of velocity vector field, environment model is built based on the properties of special area such as radar, mountains etc.. Then the driven mechanism of velocity vector field is also designed to produce the route for UAV.For solving the inherent local minimum problem of the algorithm, the method of adding guide field and virtual target point is used to deal with local minimization which caused by losing lots of environment information. Detected step method is adopted to meet with restriction of maneuver capability of UAV. In real-time planning simulation, Environment updating mechanism was used in algorithm for the dynamic environment; vector field principle is particularly attractive because of its elegance and simplicity, the complexity of algorithm is analyzed to ensure the ability of real-time planning.Then, the algorithm is divided into initialization module, updating environment module, iterative module and output module for its realization. The testing software of path planning is developed in Windows OS, the simulation environment consisted of Guided Computer and Plan Computer is constructed to confirm the real-time performance of path planning module. After simulation in Windows system, the path planning module is also applied to flight control system for semi-physical simulation. From the simulation results, the real-time performance is confirmed.