Trajectory Planning of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle using Invasive Weed Optimization

This paper presents an approach to trajectory planning of Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles using Invasive Weed Optimization. It proposes a system that generates trajectory for an Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle in a battlefield while avoiding regions where the plane risks being shot, at the same time, the system tries to minimize the path length. The threats are fully known and are static in nature. Trajectory planning is a critical problem in combat as a lot is at stake. This research work will first explore the problem and the associated issues in brief, then the problem is characterized using a simple and elegant model. Invasive Weed Optimization is used as the optimization technique for finding safe and short paths for Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles for going from source to destination; this technique is based on the life-cycle of weeds. Lastly, B-spline curve is formed to smoothen the resultant trajectory; the coordinates generated by our approach are used as control points for a B-spline curve. On all the runs, the trajectory never intersected the regions which were to be avoided as there was a heavy penalty inherent in the planning algorithm in case the path strays into risky regions.