UAV: Trajectory Generation and Simulation
Abstract
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have gained mass popularity in fields such as Defense,
Agriculture, Sport and Photography etc. Their wide adoption in such research projects have
opened new horizons for opportunities. However, UAVs operate in a rather dynamic environment
since various factors such as airspeed, temperature, pressure, turbulence etc. are capable
of hampering the flight operation. There is a need for rather robust trajectory generation algorithm
and system such that it provides an easy user interface to specify the path of UAV
through space, alongside making the UAV capable enough to maneuver itself from the initial
to final position. This project focuses on two aspects of UAV control, the first part focuses
on trajectory generation using various mathematically modeled techniques for the position,
velocity and acceleration expressed as a function of time. Their comparison is done based on
the constraint-based optimization techniques followed by some discussions. The second part
focuses on UAV simulators and lays out the foundations and requirements for them, followed
by some proposed simulators and their comparison, which could be used not only for flight
control simulation, but also have potential to integrate Reinforcement Learning techniques
for Autonomous flight control and Autopilot systems. Finally, in-depth analysis of AirSim
simulator is carried out along with its environment setup process which may be used as an
Interfacing, Installation and set-up documentation for future work.