Improving UAS Route Efficiency with Feed-forward Waypoint Augmentation
Tyler Harmon, Dominic Larkin, Christopher Korpela · 2022 International Conference on Electrical, Computer, Communications and Mechatronics Engineering (ICECCME) · 2022
This paper details a method of improving the accuracy with which a multi-rotor unmanned aerial system (UAS) can maintain a trajectory en route to pre-designated waypoints. Although most multi-rotor UAS's are nearly holonomic, variables in flight conditions such as wind speed and elevation changes make maintaining a set trajectory difficult. Here a quadcopter is used, and intermediate waypoints generated using Dubins vehicle kinematics are injected into the quadcopter's flight controller pre-flight. This allows the quad copter to utilize its existing flight controller in a more efficient way, resulting in a flight trajectory that is more resilient to variations in flight controller parameters and changes to environmental influences like wind. Additionally, treating a multi-rotor UAS as a Dubins vehicle allows for a trajectory that passes through waypoints at speed and in a non-linear fashion, decreasing risk to the vehicle from ground forces.