TY - JOUR
T1 - Tour planning for an unmanned air vehicle under wind conditions
AU - McNeely, Rachelle L.
AU - Iyer, Ram V.
AU - Chandler, Phillip R.
N1 - Funding Information:
R. McNeely would like to acknowledge a graduate student fellowship granted by the Air Vehicles Directorate Summer Research Program, summer 2005. R. Iyer was supported by an USAF/ASEE Summer Faculty Fellowship during summer 2005. The authors would like to thank S. Darbha, Texas A & M University, for introducing the work of McGee et al. to us in May 2006. We thank the anonymous referees for taking the time to review the paper and giving us valuable suggestions, and this has resulted in an improvement in the quality of the manuscript.
PY - 2007
Y1 - 2007
N2 - A very important subproblem in the task assignment problem for unmanned air vehicles is the evaluation of costs for the state transitions of a directed graph. Usually a Dubins vehicle flying in the absence of wind is considered in the computation of costs. However, when a prevailing wind vector field is considered, the costs taken on very different values and the task assignment problem can have very different solutions. In this paper, we consider the problem of constructing minimum-time trajectories for a Dubins vehicle in the presence of a time-varying wind vector field. We present results on the existence and uniqueness of minimum-time solutions for a Dubins vehicle flying in a general time-varying wind vector field under some technical conditions. These results extend the conclusions of the well-known Dubins theorem. We also propose an algorithm for obtaining the minimum-time solution for an unmanned air vehicle and prove its convergence. We also present the results of numerical experiments that show that the importance of considering wind vector fields while planning the tour for an unmanned air vehicle.
AB - A very important subproblem in the task assignment problem for unmanned air vehicles is the evaluation of costs for the state transitions of a directed graph. Usually a Dubins vehicle flying in the absence of wind is considered in the computation of costs. However, when a prevailing wind vector field is considered, the costs taken on very different values and the task assignment problem can have very different solutions. In this paper, we consider the problem of constructing minimum-time trajectories for a Dubins vehicle in the presence of a time-varying wind vector field. We present results on the existence and uniqueness of minimum-time solutions for a Dubins vehicle flying in a general time-varying wind vector field under some technical conditions. These results extend the conclusions of the well-known Dubins theorem. We also propose an algorithm for obtaining the minimum-time solution for an unmanned air vehicle and prove its convergence. We also present the results of numerical experiments that show that the importance of considering wind vector fields while planning the tour for an unmanned air vehicle.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=35348980727&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.2514/1.26055
DO - 10.2514/1.26055
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:35348980727
VL - 30
SP - 1299
EP - 1306
JO - Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics
JF - Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics
SN - 0731-5090
IS - 5
ER -