Radius of Turn and Flight Path Angle Estimation from Unmanned Aircraft Flight Trajectories

The Dubins vehicle model, with its parameters radius of turn and flight path angle, is commonly used for modeling unmanned aircraft trajectories. While Dubins model path planning is state of the art, the reverse direction, extracting Dubins model information from unmanned aircraft trajectories is poorly addressed. This article presents a method to fit the Dubins model parameters radius of turn and flight path angle to streamed aircraft trajectory data in a two-phase approach. In the first step flight phases are detected. Within the second step the corresponding radii of turn and flight path angles are estimated. The method is applied on various flight trajectories of different unmanned aircraft. The evaluation further regards the algorithms run time and states the feasibility for online applications.