Research On Real-Time UAV Route Planning Algorithm

As the UAV has the characteristics of no casualties, good concealment, strong vitality, low cost and flexible operation, it has a very important role in the modern war and broad prospect of application in the civilian field. The UAV technology has attracted wide attention and research throughout the world in recent years. The ability of UAV route planning is the key to achieve autonomous flight and autonomous attack, making it one of the hot spots and difficulties in the research into UAV.The investigation into the route planning algorithm of UAV in this paper was derived from a scientific research project: dynamic task allocation and software design of route dynamic generation algorithm for the “human in the loop” cluster of UAV. The objective of this project is to automatically generate the route that can avoid multiple threat areas and collisions during flight for N UAVs in the latitude and longitude map; as well as to generate automatically the route to altered target area with the time for route regeneration less than two seconds.The elastic band algorithm for solving the traveling salesman problem has a much faster convergence speed than other algorithms and can derive an optimal or sub optimal solution in any case, which fully satisfies the requirements of solution speed and stability during real-time route planning. The elastic band algorithm has been previously employed in route planning, leading to good results. After a detailed analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of the route planning algorithm based on the elastic band algorithm, this study presents the strategies for further improvement. Being simple and feasible, the improved algorithm can respond quickly to the real-time varying environment and is able to plan a relatively superior route within the time period requested by Party A. In addition, we also investigated the potential use of our improved algorithm in the latitude and longitude map, which further expands its applicability. Lastly, the software simulation platform was established to perform visual simulation of the algorithm, verifying the feasibility of the improved algorithm. At present, the algorithm for real-time route planning has been completed and implemented with the use of Visual C++6.0-based programming environment. The product has been delivered to and approved by Party A.