3D real-time path planning of UAVs in dynamic environments

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are taking active roles in personal, commercial, industrial and military applications due to their efficiency, availability and low-cost. UAVs must operate safely and in real-time in both static and dynamic environments. An extensive literature review, defines the dynamic environment term, the need for dynamic path planning and reviews different solutions. This paper presents a 3D real-time path planning platform to assess the performance of the A* and RRT algorithms. Four test scenarios with varying difficulty are constructed consisting of V-obstacles, cubes and 2D planes moving at time-varying speed, direction and orientation. Two rationales to either wait or move further in the direction of the goal when an intermediate goal point is not available are considered. Results show that for both A* and RRT the moving variant case performs better especially in complex scenarios. RRT performs better in simple scenarios and complex scenarios at low speed while A* performs better at high speeds in complex scenarios. A success rate of over 95% is recorded for three scenarios for all considered speeds and for both algorithm.