Improved Research on Target Unreachable Problem of Path Planning Based on Artificial Potential Field for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Artificial potential field (APF) method is a simple and effective method in robot path planning algorithm and has been widely used to plan path for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). However, the traditional APF has problems such as the local minima and the target unreachability. These problems can be solved by improving repulsive potential and attractive potential. So, following researches are carried out in this paper. Firstly, a kind of improved repulsive potential is introduced to solve the traditional target unreachable problem due to the goal with obstacles nearby. Then, one improved attractive potential is proposed to solve the common local minima problem in APF method. However, the improved attractive potential may cause a rotation around the target. To solve this problem, attractive potential is improved again. Finally, a series of simulation experiments are carried out and the simulation results show that the proposed method can plan an effective path and has a strong robustness.