Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Terrain Following/Terrain Avoidance/Threat Avoidance trajectory planning using fuzzy logic

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Bagherian, Mehri^{; *}

Affiliations: Department of Applied Math, Faculty of Mathematical Science, University of Guilan, Rasht, Iran

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author. Mehri Bagherian, Department of Applied Math, Faculty of Mathematical Science, University of Guilan, Rasht, Iran. E-mail: mbagherian@guilan.ac.ir.

Abstract: Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is an aircraft with no onboard pilot. UAV can be remotely controlled using pre-programmed flight plans. Automatic trajectory planners are an integral and critical component of advanced mission planning systems. The goal of the trajectory planning is to compute an optimal or near-optimal path satisfying UAV dynamic constraints and safety considerations. Information such as terrain data, threat information and UAV dynamic constraints should be provided beforehand and based on this information, the best trajectory should be proposed. In this paper, the 3D trajectory planning problem for a Terrain Following, Terrain Avoidance and Threat Avoidance (TF/TA/TA) mission is considered and a fuzzy logic system is proposed to find a near optimal TF/TA/TA flight path. Then the planned trajectory is compared with the trajectories obtained from Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm.

Keywords: UAV, 3D trajectory planning, TF/TA/TA mission, fuzzy system

DOI: 10.3233/JIFS-161977

Journal: Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 1791-1799, 2018