Cooperative trajectory planning for mother/child aircrafts in aerial recovery

Aerial recovery technology for aircrafts plays a significant role in practical applications, which presents a challenging problem in cooperative trajectory planning. To solve the problem, a hierarchical trajectory planning architecture is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the waypoints of the mother aircraft trajectory are obtained based on the distribution of the child aircrafts by using a hierarchical clustering algorithm. A greedy algorithm is used to obtain the traverse sequence for the waypoints and the mother aircraft trajectory is generated based on the Dubins path. Secondly, a genetic algorithm is employed to optimize the recovery position and recovery time for each child aircraft. Lastly, the trajectory of each child aircraft is generated by using a double-stage trajectory generation method. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method for cooperative trajectory planning in aerial recovery.