An energy-efficient parallel algorithm for real-time near-optimal UAV path planning

Abstract

We propose a shortest trajectory planning algorithm implementation for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) on an embedded GPU. Our goal is the development of a fast, energy-efficient global planner for multi-rotor UAVs supporting human operator during rescue missions. The work is based on OpenCL parallel non-deterministic version of the Dijkstra algorithm to solve the Single Source Shortest Path (SSSP). Our planner is suitable for real-time path re-computation in dynamically varying environments of up to 200 m2. Results demonstrate the efficacy of the approach, showing speedups of up to 74x, saving up to ~ 98% of energy versus the sequential benchmark, while reaching near-optimal path selection, keeping the average path cost error smaller than 1.2%.