RRT and Velocity Obstacles-based motion planning for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Traffic Management (UTM)

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel UTM algorithm combining RRT and VO techniques, enabling efficient, collision-free UAV navigation with improved path length and safety in complex environments.

Contribution

The paper presents a new hybrid RRT-VO algorithm for UTM, integrating offline path planning with online collision avoidance for UAVs.

Findings

Lower path length compared to APF

Enhanced collision avoidance in complex scenarios

Effective static and dynamic obstacle handling

Abstract

In this paper, an algorithm for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Traffic Management (UTM) for a finite number of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is proposed. This algorithm is developed by combining the Rapidly-Exploring Random Trees (RRT) and Velocity Obstacle (VO) algorithms and is referred to as the RRT-VO UTM algorithm. Here, the RRT algorithm works offline to generate obstacle-free waypoints in a given environment with known static obstacles. The VO algorithm, on the other hand, operates online to avoid collisions with other UAVS and known static obstacles. The boundary of the static obstacles are approximated by small circles to facilitate the formulation of VO algorithm. The proposed algorithm's performance is evaluated using numerical simulation and then compared to the well-known artificial potential field (APF) algorithm for collision avoidance. The advantages of the proposed method are clearly shown in terms of lower path length and collision avoidance capabilities for a challenging scenario.