Far field path planning for rotorcraft NOE missions in a mountainous region
LI Hua-de, Francis Suraweera · 2002
Investigates the problem of finding a path from a designated starting point to a designated goal in three-dimensional space for a rotorcraft using the nap-of-the-Earth (NOE) flight tactic. The terrain considered is a mountainous region. The paper examines the characteristics of NOE path and also explains the difficulties in getting an exact cost function for NOE path planning. Based on the characteristics of NOE flight, we then present an efficient algorithm for the solution of this problem. The worst-case complexity of the proposed algorithm is O(n/sup 2/ log n) where n is the number of vertices of a certain (grid) graph.>