3D Motion Planning of a Fixed-Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

In this paper, we adopt the architecture of the Lyapunov-based Control Scheme (LbCS) to propose a motion planner for fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) navigating in a workspace cluttered with obstacles. To perform such task, a fixed-wing aircraft is to coordinate its motion in a well planned manner. The purpose is to get such an aircraft to converge to its desired target while avoiding any obstacles intersecting its path. A set of artificial potential field functions is proposed using the control scheme for the avoidance of obstacles and attraction to their designated targets. The effectiveness of the proposed nonlinear acceleration control laws is demonstrated through computer simulations which prove the efficiency of the control technique.