Ground control system development and path planning design for unamnned aerial vehicles

A ground control system (GCS) for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) is developed in this paper. Different tasks, which include real time communication between GCS and UAVs, data processing and storing, localization, path planning and so on, can be accomplished in the proposed GCS. To address the issue of path planning problem for UAVs, a new path planning algorithm based on potential function is proposed to drive the UAV to its destination in this paper. Time-varying gain adjusting method is used to enable the UAV obstacle avoidance ability under the constraints for the translation velocity. Lyapunov based analysis is used to prove the stability of the proposed algorithm. Numerical simulation results are included to demonstrate the performance of the proposed path planning design.