Transportation Navigation Planning of an Aerial Vehicle in a Wind Turbulent Atmosphere Using Spline Interpolation Technique

This paper proposes the transportation navigation planning of an aerial vehicle using spline interpolation technique in a stormy wind turbulent atmosphere. When operating an unmanned or manned aerial vehicle in real time scenario, it is necessary to deal with the effects of wind that causes the aerial vehicle to drift away in certain condition. In such conditions, it is hard for transporting the aerial vehicle to follow certain trajectories. In order to solve this issue, choosing an optimal shortest transportation trajectory with minimal time of travel is needed. In this research work, the prime objective is to find the most optimal aerial vehicle trajectory for transportation through a randomly generated vector field of wind values in the least possible time. Initially, waypoints are positioned in straight line from source point to destination point and after they are re-positioned to generate optimal trajectory using Probabilistic RoadMaps (PRMs) method. It is also seen that the generated waypoints not only avoids the headwinds area, but also utilizes tailwinds area for navigating and smooth operation of aerial vehicle. The trajectory that is traced is then smoothed using spline interpolation technique for smooth navigation of the aerial vehicle to reach the destined location.