Optimal Guidance for Integrated Waypoint Following and Obstacle Avoidance

This paper addresses the problem of energy-optimal waypoint-following guidance for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle with the consideration of arbitrary number of obstacles. The proposed guidance law is derived as a solution of a linear quadratic optimal control problem in conjunction with convex parameter optimization. The algorithm developed integrates path following and obstacle avoidance into a single step and is able to be applied to a general waypoint-following mission. Several particular cases of the proposed guidance law are presented to provide better insights of the proposed algorithm. Nonlinear numerical simulations clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed formulations.