A Novel Cooperative Path Planning for Multiple Aerial Platforms
Genshe Chen, Dan Shen, Jose B. Cruz, Chiman Kwan, Stephania Riddle, Steven E. Cox, Carey Matthews · Infotech@Aerospace · 2005
Cooperative path planning (CPP) is one of the core steps to effectively exploit the capabilities of multi-level cooperative control of multiple aerial platforms. The main purpose of CPP is to develop a set of algorithms such that platforms in a given scenario could cooperatively find a desired path to reach certain destinations. CPP specifies way-points for platforms to reach certain destinations while meeting certain requirements, including minimizing en route threats, meeting time constraints, keeping mutual spacing, and decreasing fuel consumption. In this paper, we propose a novel path planning method based on Pareto optimization and a foraging algorithm. Our graph cut based Pareto solution serves as a reference trajectory for the foraging algorithm, which further dynamically refines the reference path. We have implemented and evaluated our proposed CPP algorithm. In addition, extensive experiments and comparative studies have been carried out. In particular, we compared our algorithm with the Pareto-Voronoi approach and the original Voronoi algorithm.