Mission Design and Optimization Tool

The use of multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in industrial and civil applications has seen a rapid development. This is to be attributed to their simple mechanical design, along with hovering and maneuvering capabilities, making them a popular choice in applications such as aerial photography, cargo transport, infrastructure inspection or disaster management. Mission requirements tzpically include many variables such as UAV target location, payload capacity or required time of flight combined with environmental constraints such as no-fly zones or terrain. These conditions would be hard to satisfy mutually without the use of modern trajectory optimization techniques. Trajectory optimization problems are often formulated using optimal control theory. An Optimal Control Problem (OCP) for generalized multirotor UAV introducing environmental constraints has been formulated and solved by a direct transcription approach, thus converting the OCP to a nonlinear parameter optimization problem. Furthermore, a Gauss pseudospectral method for transcription with high accuracy has been implemented, enabling to design a framework for UAV trajectory optimization problems in constrained environments.