Paper presented at Unmanned Aircraft Systems Conference

Project partner University of Luxembourg has presented a technical paper at the International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS) held in Warsaw, Poland. The paper titled: An Integrated Real-time UAV Trajectory Optimization and Potential Field Approach for Dynamic Collision Avoidance presents an integrated approach that combines trajectory optimization and Artificial Potential Field (APF) method for real-time optimal Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) trajectory planning and dynamic collision avoidance. A minimum-time trajectory optimization problem is formulated with initial and final positions as boundary conditions and collision avoidance as constraints. It is transcribed into a nonlinear programming problem using Chebyshev pseudospectral method. A novel sigmoid-type collision avoidance constraint is proposed to overcome the drawbacks of Lagrange polynomial approximation in pseudospectral methods that guarantees inequality constraint satisfaction only at nodal points. Automatic differentiation of cost function and constraints is used to quickly determine their gradient and Jacobian, respectively. An APF method is used to update the optimal control inputs for guaranteeing collision avoidance. The technical paper is accompanied by an experiment video.