Path Planning Based on State-of-Health of the Power Source for a Class of Multirotor UAVs

The multirotor UAVs with Vertical Take-off and Landing (VTOL) capabilities are powered by Lithium Polymer (Li-Po) batteries which supply the energy to launch either indoor and outdoor missions. However, according to number of charges/discharges the battery tends to exhibit an aging behavior. An aging battery could restrict the flight capabilities and cause maneuverability problems increasing the risks of collision. In that sense, in this paper a path planning strategy that take into account the State of Health (SoH) of the Li-Po battery for a class of multirotor UAVs is introduced as an optimization problem. The SoH is computed by introduce a degradation model which affects the battery discharge performance, and an optimization problem is defined to find the feasible path between way-points while minimize the energy supplied by the battery according to the present SoH. The path planning strategy is applied to an hexarotor UAV, and the simulation results show the feasibility of the proposed methodology.