Optimal path planning for an unmanned aerial vehicle under navigation relayed by multiple stations to intercept a moving target

The navigation relayed by multiple stations (NRMS) is a cooperative navigation technology which relies on multiple stations to guide an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) sequentially. The stations which are scattered in different spatial locations provide the navigation information or the control command for the UAV. This paper addresses the optimal path planning problem for a UAV navigated by the NRMS technology to intercept a moving target. This problem is formulated as a constrained optimization problem which involves four constraints: the navigation range constraint, the navigation handover constraint, the maximum turning angle constraint, and the time difference constraint. The first two constraints distinguish our problem from other path planning problems. A differential evolution based (DE-based) path planning algorithm is proposed to find a feasible and high-quality path for the UAV. The numerical stability and effectiveness of the DE-based path planning algorithm are demonstrated by computational experiments.