Robust UAV Path Planning via Safe Flight Corridor and Penalty Function

Path planning plays an important role in autonomous drones. This paper proposes a path planning algorithm for drones. The key idea is to combine safe flight corridor (SFC) as hard constraints and penalty functions as soft constraints to generate a safe and efficient path in complex environments. SFCs are composed of a series of convex polyhedra constructed from the initial path, and the function of SFCs is to constrain the path within their own structures. Then, the penalty functions will optimize path’s smoothness, motion feasibility, obstacle avoidance safety and other characteristics. The simulation experiment results show that compared with the traditional baseline algorithm, the proposed algorithm is better in terms of trajectory smoothness, safety, and computational efficiency.