Navigation-aware Path Planning for Multiple UAVs in Urban Environment

This paper tackles the problem of multi-VAV routing in urban environment. Due to the heterogenous GNSS coverage characterizing these environments, path selection and waypoint assignment should account for the navigation performance of the UAVs, so as to guarantee flyable trajectories within an autonomous flight framework. Therefore, this paper accounts for navigation capability and onboard sensor performance while assigning waypoints to the VAVs. A centralized strategic flight planner is developed, which adapts to navigation performance levels and can also handle fleets of heterogeneous UAVs. The proposed path planning algorithm is tested in simulations using a 3D real-world scenario. The impact on path planning efficiency of different onboard sensors performance and of eventual ground infrastructure support is discussed.