Research on flight routing devices for unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract

The aim of the work is the development and research of methods for pre-flight optimal planning of flight routes for light unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) considering the influence of constant wind and limitations on flight duration. The relevance is driven by the fact that for light UAVs, the airspeed is comparable to the wind speed, which makes accounting for wind a critical factor for efficiency. Traditional routing approaches that ignore wind lead to suboptimal solutions and excessive energy consumption. In this work, routing problems (for closed-loop and open-loop routes, equivalent and weighted points, fixed or selectable start/finish points) are formalized as Boolean linear programming problems. To solve them, a computationally efficient procedure of iterative exclusion of "subtours" is applied. A parametric analysis was conducted, which shows that open-loop routes, unlike closed-loop ones, can demonstrate a time gain due to a "tailwind"