Determination of Waypoints to Maximize the Survivability of UAV against Anti-air Threats

Abstract

This paper proposes a determination method of waypoints to maximize the survivability of a UAV. Voronoi diagram which is used for the initial selection of waypoint candidates is the most widely used path planning technique to avoid the threat as far as possible when the location and strength of the threat are given. But if threat strength is different each other and flight path is constrained along with straight lines, Voronoi diagram has limitations in real applications. In this study, the initial waypoints obtained from Voronoi diagram are optimized considering the shape of each threat. Here, a waypoint is optimized while adjacent waypoints are fixed. By repeating this localized optimization until whole waypoints are converged, computation time for finding the best waypoints is greatly reduced.