Fast Cooperative Trajectory Generation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Using a Bezier Curve-Based Shaping Method

This study uses a Bezier curve-based shaping (BCBS) approach based on the dynamic model to quickly generate 3D cooperative trajectories for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). It can facilitate the solution of the flight trajectory problem that occurs after the reallocation of mission points. Trajectory coordinates are expanded based on the Bezier curves that naturally satisfy boundary conditions (BCs); trajectories with the minimum flight time and those satisfying the dynamic constraints and collision-free conditions can be obtained by adjusting the Bezier coefficients. A three-UAV flight simulation is carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Further, the performance of the proposed method is compared with that of the Gauss pseudospectral method (GPM). The simulation results of the BCBS method are used as the initial values for GPM optimization. It is demonstrated that the BCBS method requires a lower computation time than the direct solver, which is only 0.07% of the latter, and obtains similar optimization results (3.34% difference). This is considerably important for the rapid generation of optimized trajectories with the limited computing power of onboard computers. Furthermore, this method is expected to achieve online collaborative trajectory generation for multiple UAVs in view of its high computational efficiency.