An Improved APF-based Path Planning Algorithm for a Quadrotor Intercepting Autonomous Ground Robots

In this paper, a path planning problem is investigated for a quadrotor which is required to intercept a group of target robots in an environment with moving obstacle robots. First of all, the kinematics model of the quadrotor, target robot and obstacle robot are established and the path planning problem is formulated. Then, an IMM-based estimation is given to provide the precise velocity of the target robot to be used in path planning algorithm, which performs a periodic movement with a rough period. Then, an improved Artificial Potential Field(APE)-based path planning method is proposed in which the suffer of the local minima can be avoided. Finally, simulation experimenal results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.