Safe Corridor Constrained Trajectory Planning for Formation Flight of Fixed-Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Autonomous formation flight of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in confined environments still remains an open problem. To tackle this challenge, this paper proposes a safe corridor constrained trajectory planning method for formation flight. A novel safe corridor construct method is designed to generate collision-free space in narrow passage. Then, the formation keeping constraint is described by using Laplacian matrix, and the similarity deviation between current formation and predefined formation is used as the cost function in the optimization problem. The formation flight trajectory planning problem is formulated via MINCO, a powerful spatial-temporal joint trajectory representation method, to efficiently generate dynamically feasible trajectory for fixed-wing UAVs. Numerical simulations on formation flight scenarios are implemented, and the results validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the safe corridor constrained trajectory planning method.