Analysis, Assessment and Development of Online Path Planning Algorithms for Helicopters under Threat

Abstract

This paper investigates the scenario, in which a helicopter is attacked by a Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW) threat, and tries to automatically find an escape path which minimizes the encountered threat on the corresponding escape trajectory. To achieve this goal, well-established path planning algorithms are used in conjuncture with an elementary flight simulation and a threat metric, in order to evaluate different path planning algorithms and their ability to minimize the exposure to a sensed SALW source. Additionally, a genetic optimization algorithm is used to optimize the hyper parameters of the individual path planning algorithms to strengthen their ability to minimize the threat and improve execution time. The optimized path-planning algorithms show a significant improvement in the minimization of the SALW threat of the planned trajectory compared to the original trajectory.