Trajectory Generation for Rendezvous of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles with Kinematic Constraints

In this paper, we present an efficient method for finding collision-free trajectory for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with kinematic constraints and for their rendezvous to form a formation. First, we construct a visibility graph that supports a minimum turning radius constraint when constructing the graph, so that additional smoothing process is not necessary. Second, we modify the standard A* to consider velocity conditions for rendezvous and collision avoidance with obstacles or other UAVs. Permitting velocity decrease only when it is required that the robot slow down the speed, unnecessary node expansions are avoided. This multi-vehicle problem is solved in a decoupled manner. In order to show the effectiveness of this approach, we present simulation results of rendezvous and independent flight for multiple UAVs.