Autonomous coordination among multiple aerial vehicles to ensure a collision free airspace is a critical aspect of today’s airspace. With the rise of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in the military and commercial sectors, obstacle avoidance in a densely populated airspace is necessary. This thesis investigates finding optimal or near-optimal trajectories in real-time for aircraft in complex airspaces containing a large number of obstacles. The solution for the trajectories is described as a linear program subject to mixed integer constraints, known as a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP). The resulting MILP problem is solved in real time using a well-known, public domain MILP solver. In addition, an Exhaustive, Breadth-First Search algorithm was implemented and is used for comparison in terms of execution time and flight path optimality. The Exhaustive Search algorithm is comprised of a multi-branch tree structure that iterates through all possible flight paths from source to target. The MILP solution was implemented in both PC based and embedded system environments. The embedded system environment was implemented on an onboard processor to develop trajectories for each individual aircraft in real time.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:vcu.edu/oai:scholarscompass.vcu.edu:etd-5522 |
| Date | 01 January 2016 |
| Creators | Devens, James A |
| Publisher | VCU Scholars Compass |
| Source Sets | Virginia Commonwealth University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Theses and Dissertations |
| Rights | © The Author |
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