Optimized Artificial Potential Fields for Obstacle Avoidance of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

The obstacle avoidance method for unmanned aerial vehicles is presented in this paper. Obstacle avoidance is a crucial ability necessary in the operation of autonomous vehicles when they are required to follow a path that passes obstacles. The artificial potential field (APF) algorithm is a path-planning algorithm developed in robotics that allows the avoidance of static obstacles. In this paper, the optimized APF has been applied. The optimized APF has an advantage over the classic APF, namely, avoiding local minima and unreached targets. It can be shown that the algorithm has been successfully applied in simulation to perform obstacle avoidance in several scenarios.