Real-time Trajectory Planning for Autonomous Parafoil in Obstacle-Rich Environment

Parafoil system is suitable for large-area and longtime surveillance and airdrop missions and has the advantages of simple structure, low cost and high load capacity. The system is utilized for delivery mission in open area, where there is no obstacles or few obstacles. After released from the airplane, the system performs a classical three-phases landing strategy consisting of homing, energy management and terminal landing. This paper utilizes the classical guidance framework and presents a revised method of terminal landing using Bezier curves to solve obstacles avoidance problems in obstacle rich environment for parafoil system. With the definition of Bezier curve and cost function, the terminal landing path generation problem is converted to an optimization problem and is solved using nonlinear optimizer. To deal with different environments, a terminal landing strategy is developed. The simulation results show its effectiveness on parafoil system terminal path planning.