Receding Horizon Control with Extended Solution for UAV Path Planning

The receding horizon control (RHC) greatly reduces the planning time and achieves great success in UAV online path planning because of rolling window optimization. However, due to its small range of path search in the time window, UAVs cannot cope with environments with uncertain obstacles and multiple flight constraints. Therefore, the receding horizon control with extended solution (RHC-eS) method is proposed for UAV path planning based on the traditional RHC. This method first designs the path expansion mechanism, which not only expands the search range of feasible solutions but also ensures the real-time performance by the two-way search strategy. Secondly, in order to increase the richness of solutions, the crossover and directional variation strategy of Genetic Algorithm (GA) are integrated. Finally, the Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) method is used to optimize the objective function. The simulation results of UAV path planning in simple and complex environments certify that the proposed method can obtain shorter, safer, and smoother paths compared with the existing methods.