A Penetration Path Planning Algorithm for UAV Based on Laguerre Diagram

Due to the special requirements of modern military, unmanned combat aircraft (UAVs) attracts more and more attention from the researchers all over the world. It possesses many advantages, such as zero life risk, stronger combat capability,and better adaptability to harsh combat environments than manual-controlled aircraft. The wide application of UAVs on the battlefield determines their important position in the war. With the rapid development of military science and technology. Nevertheless, there is a conflict between large amount of computing data in complex battlefield environments and limited computing capability of onboard computers. Therefore, a stable and efficient path planning algorithm is critical. This paper aims to dramatically improve the efficiency of path planning by using Laguerre diagram method. Through combing the Laguerre diagram method and the Dijkstra algorithm, the path planning algorithm we proposed in this paper could obtain feasible solutions with lower computational cost by decreasing path nodes and reducing the scale of the problem further. Furthermore, the current research mainly focuses on 2D scenes, which is inconsistent with the actual UAV flight situation. Therefore, this paper proposes a Laguerre diagram based path planning algorithm in 3D scenes. Simulation shows that the execution time of the stage of path planning reduced to one-third compare to the Dijkstra algorithm on the grid.