Motion planning of UAV platooning in unknown cluttered environment

This paper studies platooning problem of multiple VTOL unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in an unknown cluttered environment such as urban canyon, forest or indoor environment. Each UAV is equipped with a limited range sensor that is used to actively detect obstacles around it, and an on-board camera is equipped to estimate the relative position between UAVs. In this study, the platooning problem of multiple UAVs is converted to the motion planning problem of an individual UAV in unknown cluttered environments by introducing a leader-follower strategy. A decomposition hierarchic on-line motion planning approach consisting of 3D path planning and 3D trajectory generation is proposed to generate the collision-free reference trajectory. Both the simulation and experiment demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed motion planning approach on achieving multiple UAVs platooning in unknown cluttered environment.

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