Routing of a Light Unmanned Aerial Vehicle in a Constant Wind Field with Account of Constraint on the Flight Duration

Abstract

Recently, some articles have appeared which discuss the problem of preflight routing for the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). The importance of the problem is determined by the fact that its solving is necessary for flight planning and modeling of UAV with a view of an effective assessment of its mission. The above mentioned papers view routing as a sequence of flights over the setpoints with certain positioning data. The notion of route optimality is associated with, on the one hand, increasing amount of the setpoints included into the route and, on the other hand, with a decrease of the period of time for an en-route flight. In this case, consideration of the problem of routing with a constraint for the en-route flight time is of practical relevance. Thus, it is the amount of the setpoints potentially set by the route that must serve as a maximal criterion. It is quite clear that such statement may result in a situation, when some selected setpoints are out of the optimal route. The paper describes the methods of finding a light UAV circle trip which links the maximum of the equivalent setpoints in a constant wind field taking into account the time constraint. The selected route is the fastest of all the routes linking the setpoints. The methods envisage consecutive solving of the purposely set central and sub-related routing problems. Mathematically, they are the problems of linear Boolean programming. Thus, a flight route can be divided in two stages. At the first stage, it is necessary to define the maximum of the setpoints linked by the routes with the flight time, which does not exceed the one, which is allowed. At the second stage, one should define the fastest of the first stage routes. An example was introduced explaining the details and showing the performance capacity of the present flight routing procedure. The results can be used at the planning stage for modeling of UAV application with a view to improve assessment of its mission effectiveness, as well as for designing of special algorithms and software for the UAV controllers' working area.