TRAJECTORY GENERATION IN A THREE-DIMENSIONAL FLIGHT PLAN WITH OBSTACLE AVOIDANCE FOR AN AIRBORNE LAUNCH CRAFT

For the mission safety and e©ciency, an airborne launch vehicle has to ¦nd an appropriate route to reach the mission goal satisfying some environment requirements and system constraints. A modi¦ed three-dimensional (3D) waypoints generation path based on an improved version of the A ∗ algorithm is proposed to ¦nd an optimal §ight plan solution. This simple geometric path planning procedure can be imple-mented in real time in order to plan a new reference trajectory. In pres-ence of detected obstacles such as turbulence zones, no-§y zones, storms, etc., the information about the environment is regularly updated. This route reaches one or multiple goal points important for the mission suc-cess in order of their priority. The improved A ∗ capabilities are tested via simulations in di¨erent scenario.