Safe Dispatch Corridor: Toward Efficient Trajectory Planning for Carrier Aircraft Traction System on Flight Deck

Due to the increasingly complex deck environment and intensive sortie requirement, there is a growing demand to realize the autonomous dispatch on the flight deck. To meet this demand, efficient and robust dispatch trajectory planning is indispensable. Solutions based on optimal control have drawn much attention due to their capability of strict constraint satisfaction, whereas complicated collision-avoidance constraints (CACs) lead to significant numerical difficulties. In this article, we focus on aircraft traction system and propose a hierarchical dispatch trajectory planning method. During implementation, we first establish a dilated grid map to represent the deck environment, and a modified hybrid A* algorithm that integrates special collision-check mechanisms is designed to search a coarse reference path. We then resample along the reference path to determine a series of safe dispatch corridors (SDCs) at discretization nodes. As a result, the traditional “one-to-one” description of CACs in the optimal control problem can be replaced by a simple within-SDC fashion. Finally, the remaining numerical optimization phase is warm started by the resampled results to further facilitate convergence. The proposed method is validated by various dispatch scenarios, highlighting its efficiency and robustness.