Calculating Flight Time for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in the Presence of Obstacles and the Incorporation of Flight Dynamics

This paper considers the problem of calculating flight time for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) while incorporating flight dynamics in an operational field that contains obstacles. These flight time calculations can be used as parameter inputs in mission planning and dynamic reassignment problems. A network generation procedure is developed and pseudonodes are added into the network to include flight dynamics in the edge weights. The network generation procedure includes a method for handling a pop-up target in a dynamic reassignment problem. A selective Dijkstra’s algorithm was designed and implemented to ensure that the shortest path between two nodes of interest contains flight dynamics. A complex mission plan consisting of thirty tasks and three obstacles was the largest test scenario of nine developed scenarios. Our network generation procedure along with the shortest path calculations of all 992 node pairs of interest solves in approximately one second. This procedure allows for the fast computation needed for a dynamic domain such as the use of mission planning algorithms and dynamic reassignment algorithms.