Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are, from a physical point of view, inherently inert. This means that they require an acceleration force to change their direction of movement and/or velocity magnitude. Until now, however, these physical properties associated with inertia have not been taken into account in the planning of a flight mission for a multirotor UAV in sufficient detail. In the best case, this leads to the problem that the resulting flight mission is not as efficient as the kinematic characteristics would allow. In the worst case, the calculated mission plan requires physical properties such as maneuverability or acceleration power that the considered multirotor UAV does not provide. Consequently, the determined reference trajectory of the planned mission cannot be tracked by the UAV. This results in spatial and temporal errors compared to what was planned which might lead to a mission execution with a significantly lower quality than expected. In this work, we give deep insights into the problem of inertia-based route planning with multirotor UAVs, a special UAV type, as an example. To model the real physical capabilities of multirotor UAVs, we develop a new analytical approach for time-optimal trajectory planning for point-masses with constrained velocity and acceleration. The trajectories yielded by our new method have proven to be sufficiently precise in modeling a multirotor UAV’s full physical capabilities. Further, since our approach is based on analytical solutions in closed form, it is computationally extremely cheap. Next, we introduce the kinematic traveling salesman problem (KTSP) and the kinematic orienteering problem (KOP), which are based on the assumption that each waypoint of a flight mission can be traversed with different heading angles and velocities. For each possibility to travel between a waypoint pair, we utilize our time-optimal trajectory planning approach introduced above to describe the associated motion. We develop a mathematical model for both, the KTSP and the KOP, and hence can solve related problems with a commercial general-purpose solver to global optimality. Since both problems are combinatorial and classified as NP-hard, we additionally develop heuristic algorithms to solve both problem classes in a short time with sufficient solution quality. The presented results show that our research on inertia-based route planning problems significantly improves the achieved quality of UAV mission planning compared to state-of-the-art approaches.


    Access

    Download

    Check availability in my library

    Order at Subito €


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    Inertia-based Routing - New Approaches using Time-Optimal Trajectory Generation for Multirotor UAVs as an Example


    Contributors:

    Publication date :

    2024



    Type of media :

    Book


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English





    Optimal Energy-Efficient Trajectory Planning for Multirotor UAVs

    Chebl, Bernard / Saied, Majd / Shraim, Hassan et al. | IEEE | 2025


    Trajectory optimization of multirotor agricultural UAVs

    Pradeep, Priyank / Park, Sang Gyun / Wei, Peng | IEEE | 2018


    Trajectory-based Traveling Salesman Problem for Multirotor UAVs

    Meyer, Fabian / Glock, Katharina | IEEE | 2021


    UNIVERSAL CONTROLLER FOR ROBUST TRAJECTORY TRACKING IN MULTIROTOR UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLES (UAVs)

    GOMEZ GUTIERREZ DAVID / FALCONER MAYNARD C | European Patent Office | 2019

    Free access