A rapid incremental motion planner for flexible formation control of fixed-wing UAVs

Motion planning for a formation of nonholonomic fixed-wing UAVs in environments with obstacles is a challenge especially when the operating envelope of the platform´s is considered in the planning problem. This paper presents a rapid formation motion planning algorithm to determine a formation leader trajectory between a start pose and a final pose in the presence of stationary obstacles (static no-fly-zones) based on concatenated Dubins curves. The planner encodes formation configuration (shape) and UAV operating envelope in the planning problem to ensure that the computed formation leader trajectory is flyable by the formation. The effectiveness of the planner was evaluated in simulation using our recently proposed flexible formation keeping control scheme based on six degree-of-freedom (6DOF) fixed-wing UAVs models [1].