Research On Rescue Helicopter Route Planning

Route planning is one of the key pre-flight preparations for the civil helicopters with the search and rescue missions. Especially in the complex mountainous terrain, it is often hard to find a proper route for the helicopters quickly. So the route planning problem for helicopter with rescue missions is proposed in the thesis, aiming at finding a proper route for the helicopters to fly safely and reach the destination in the shortest time.Based on the study on the digital elevation model(DEM) and contour map, obstacle map in the form of the contour is processed using mathematical morphology image processing technology to get the route planning space. On this basis, the heuristic search algorithm is selected to search for the shortest path in the two dimensional space.In the case of route planning in the three dimensional space, the space is divided into several levels with different altitude which decomposed the three dimensional planning space into many two dimensional planes according to the precision requirement. Feasible route area is acquired at each level. All the feasible grids on every level are then combined to compose the three dimensional planning space before the route planning using ant colony algorithm.The multi targets search and coordination for multiple helicopters problem is also studied. First, according to the characteristic of mission on each target, the availability of the helicopter for the target is assessed, and then the missions on the targets are assigned to proper helicopters. At last, the multi targets route planning is transformed into travelling salesman problem and solved using generic algorithm.Simulation results of all the approaches mentioned above are presented on the platform of MATLAB, with the help of digital map processing software Global Mapper. So the feasibility of these approaches is proved.