Obstacle Avoidance for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Trajectory Planning Using Virtual Convex Projection Technique

A study demonstrates the development of a convex-optimization-based method that can ensure a solution without relying on successive iterations and initialization. This is achieved by a three-step solution space reduction technique that reformulates the original problem as a convex optimization problem and ensures that its solution is feasible for the original problem. The first step is similar to the standard way to initialize s sequential convex programming (SCP) in many studies, where the trajectory planning problem without considering avoidance-related constraints is constructed and solved to obtain the optimal trajectory in an obstacle-free environment, called the virtual trajectory. A series of virtual directions of control are generated to describe desirable controlling directions to drive the UAV to move away from the obstacles according to the geometric relationship between the obstacles and time-varying positional information of the UAV.