Geofencing Motion Planning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Using an Anticipatory Range Control Algorithm

This paper presents a range control approach for implementing hard geofencing for unmanned air vehicles (UAVs), and especially remotely piloted versions (RPVs), via a proposed anticipatory range calculator. The approach employs turning circle intersection tests that anticipate the fence perimeter on approach. This ensures the vehicle turns before penetrating the geofence and remains inside the allowable operational airspace by accounting for the vehicles’ turning dynamics. Allowance is made for general geozone shapes and locations, including those located at the problematic poles and meridians where nonlinear angle mapping is dealt with, concave geozones, narrow corners with acute internal angles, and transient turn dynamics. The algorithm is shown to prevent any excursions using a high-fidelity simulation of a small remotely piloted vehicle. The algorithm relies on a single tuning parameter which can be determined from the closed-loop rise time in the aircraft’s roll command tracking.