Real-time trajectory generation for the cooperative path planning of multi-vehicle systems

This paper discusses a cooperative path planning (CPP) design methodology for multi-vehicle systems and a nonlinear trajectory generation (NTG) algorithm. Three scenarios of multi-vehicle tasking are proposed at the CPP framework. The NTG algorithm is then used to generate a real time trajectory for desired vehicle activities. Given system dynamics and constraints, the NTG algorithm first finds trajectory curves in a lower dimensional space and then parameterizes the curves by the B-spline basis. The coefficients of the B-splines are further solved by the sequential quadratic programming to satisfy the optimization objectives and constraints. The NTG algorithm has been implemented to generate real-time trajectories for a group of cooperative vehicles in the presence of changing missions and constraints.