Three dimensional obstacle avoidance maneuver planning using mixed integer linear programming

This paper extends the problem of finding time-optimal trajectories for an autonomous system or vehicle to three dimensions. An unmanned aerial vehicle is considered to be flying through a three dimensional surroundings with obstacles and/or no fly-zone. It is shown that this problem can be written as a linear program with mixed integer/linear constraints that account for the collision avoidance. A major benefit of this approach is that the path optimization can be readily solved using the CPLEX optimization software with an AMPL interface.