Planar path planning for flight vehicles in wind with turn rate and acceleration bounds

Abstract

This paper is concerned with path planning for an autonomous flight vehicle operating in a steady, uniform flow-field. We model the vehicle as a particle that travels in the horizontal plane at a constant speed relative to the ambient flow. The vehicle may turn in either direction, subject to symmetric constraints on the turn rate and the turn acceleration. The contribution of the paper is a simple method for generating candidate minimum-time paths from a given initial point and heading to a given final point and heading.