Environment representation and path planning for unmanned aircraft in industrial indoor applications

After their commercial success in the consumer sector, autonomous unmanned aircraft (UA) have also opened up industrial fields of application. In addition to the already established use of UA for inspection or stocktaking, the suitability of UA for transportation tasks is topic of research and pilot projects. UA are able to operate in the space above the production systems, thus extend the flow of materials by the third dimension and allow a flexible and fast transportation. Due to their three-dimensional movement capabilities, the common path-planning algorithms used for mobile robots cannot be employed but novel approaches are required to achieve a structured routing and an efficient use of the available space. The paper presents an environment model suitable for the application with UA and a multi-layered path planning approach. Thereby, the environment is divided into individual flight levels, which can be enriched with additional information to control the UA's movements. (C) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.