Online path planning for autonomous airship in restricted environments

This paper proposed an On-line path planning algorithm for an autonomous airship based on the genetic algorithms. The airship assumed to be used in applications that consider existence of restricted environment and require the airship to fly few meters above the ground where there is a big possibility of collisions with obstacles. The proposed On-line path planner takes in consideration the detections of the unexpected obstacles, the changes in the environment conditions and the modifications on the mission goals. The On-line path planning has two processes: path recovery which is responsible to produce feasible paths to avoid collisions with obstacles. Path recalculation which is responsible to keeps the route of the airship as optimal as possible according to a certain optimization criteria. The experimental simulation tests of the proposed On-line path planning shows that it success to avoid obstacles and find alternative optimal routes in a reasonable time.