Minimum Time Dubins Airplane Paths with Asymmetric Climb Rates
Robotics
Summary
The authors improved a way to plan paths for airplanes that have limits on how sharply they can turn and how fast they can climb or descend. Traditional methods treat climbing up and going down as equally hard, which is not always true and leads to less efficient routes. They proposed a method that treats climbing and descending differently, making paths quicker—up to 71% faster in tests. Their approach also helps find good routes more quickly when planning over difficult terrain, and they showed it works in a real flight.
Authors
Jaeyoung Lim, Giuseppe Loianno
Abstract
Dubins airplane paths approximate the limited maneuverability of fixed-wing vehicles with minimum curvature and climb rate constraints. However, the symmetric climb rate constraints result in sub-optimal paths and conservative vehicle performance. In this work, we propose asymmetric Dubins airplane paths, which consider asymmetric climb rates for climbing and descending. We revisit the time optimality conditions and show that the asymmetric flight path angle constraints preserve optimality. We show that by considering asymmetric climb rates, we can take advantage of full performance of the vehicle, reducing the minimum time by 71% for connecting randomly generated states. We also demonstrate that the added climb rate results in 2.8 times faster to find the median solution time when integrated into a sampling-based planning task on rugged terrain, due to the added feasibility. We further demonstrate the practicality of the approach with a real-world flight.