Filtered Medial Surface Based Approach for 3D Collision-Free Path Planning Problem

Abstract

This paper introduces an original 3D path planning approach for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) applications. More specifically, the core idea is to generate a smooth and collision-free path with respect to the vehicle dimension. Given a 3D grid representation of the environment, the Generalized Voronoi Graph (GVG) is first approximated using a filtered medial surface (FMS) algorithm on the corresponding navigable space. Based on an efficient pruning criterion, the produced FMS excludes GVG portions corresponding to narrow passages unfitting safe UAV navigation constraints, and thus it defines a set of guaranteed safe trajectories within the environment. Given a set of starting and destination coordinates, an adapted A-star algorithm is then applied to compute the shortest path on the FMS. Finally, an optimization process ensures the smoothness of the final path by fitting a set of 3D Bézier curves to the initial path. For a comparative study, the A-star algorithm is applied directly on the input environment representation and relevant comparative criteria are defined to assert the proposed approach using simulation results.