An improved geometrical path planning algorithm for UAV in irregular-obstacle environment

Recently unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has been widely used in both military and civil fields and becomes an important equipment widely used in many fields. With the diversification of UAV environment, it is very important to find a collision-free path in complex environment. Traditional path planning algorithms can find feasible paths, but they do not have a good balance between time efficiency and path length. Traditional geometric algorithms can only avoid obstacles with special shapes. In this paper, an improved geometric path planning algorithm is proposed, which can make UAV avoid obstacles of arbitrary shape in complex environment and find shorter paths. First, for irregular obstacles, a convex polygon model is established. Then, the heuristic method is used to select the path segment, which solves the disadvantage of traditional geometric algorithm falling into local optimal solution. And the idea of quadratic programming is proposed to generate collision-free paths from adjacent paths, and a new security threshold strategy is proposed for this method. Finally, in order to verify the performance of the algorithm, this paper simulates in different complex environments and compares the proposed algorithm with A∗ algorithm from several aspects.