Safe Receding Horizon Control of an Aerial Vehicle

This paper addresses the problem of designing a real time high performance controller and trajectory generator for air vehicles. The control objective is to use information about terrain and enemy threats to fly low and avoid radar exposure on the way to a given target. The proposed algorithm builds on the well known approach of receding horizon control (RHC) combined with a terminal cost, calculated from a graph representation of the environment. Using a novel safety maneuver, and under an assumption on the maximal terrain inclination, we are able to prove safety as well as task completion. The safety maneuver is incorporated in the short term optimization, which is performed using nonlinear programming (NLP). Some key characteristics of the trajectory planner are highlighted through simulations