A spatially wind aware quadcopter (UAV) path planning approach

Wind aware path planning is essential towards the development of autonomous quadcopters (UAVs) which will be able to fly efficiently in outdoor environments. In this paper, the wind formation and quadcopter kinematics are presented so as to provide cost functions for A* based on distance and wind information. Furthermore, a collision checking method is proposed, which is incorporated to a flight scenario in an outdoor terrain under various wind formations. A computational comparison of a uniform graph and a PRM based graph is finally evaluated. Experiments on artificial wind fields, through illustrative simulations, highlight the benefit of wind aware A* searching algorithm. (C) 2019, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.