Hybrid UAV path planning based on interfered fluid dynamical system and improved RRT

In this paper, a hybrid strategy based on interfered fluid dynamical system (IFDS) and improved rapidly-exploring random tree (IRRT) is proposed for the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) route planning problem in 3-dimensional complex environments. By imitating the phenomenon of fluid flow, the IFDS method can plan a smooth and safe path quickly, but the route may fall into the concave area produced by some overlapping obstacles. Hence the IFDS method is combined with IRRT, which introduces the target probability and heuristic evaluation function on the basis of the traditional RRT. In this hybrid method, the IRRT method can be adopted as the framework of route planning, where the expanding nodes can be computed by IFDS algorithm. The simulation results by different methods prove that this method is of good performance of space searching and obstacle avoidance in 3-dimensional path planning.