Minimum-Time Path Planning for Autonomous Landing of UAV on Aerial Drone Carrier
Morteza Alijani, Anas Osman · 2021
The motivation for this work stems from the need to develop trajectory planning algorithms for small UAVs with limited resources. The goal is to address one of the most critical problems in UAV design, namely weight constraints. Therefore, in order to reduce the weight, small batteries are used which affect the flight duration and overall performance. To increase the operating time during a mission, frequent recharging is typically required. To solve this problem, an autonomous air-to-air take-off and landing on a drone carrier for recharging is proposed. The main objective of this study is to calculate the minimum time and thus the shortest maneuver route between the UAV and the drone carrier. To achieve this goal, the path planning algorithm is utilized through the closed-loop direct optimal control approach to calculate the optimal time, which is defined as a cost function. In addition to the optimization techniques, the singular perturbation technique (SPT) and the Hamiltonian are used to solve and refine the optimal control problem (OCP). Finally, the numerical simulation results in both open and closed loop are presented and the performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated.