UAV Path Planning with Derivative of the Heuristic Angle

This paper introduces improved weighted A* (WA*DH), an advanced version of the weighted A* (WA*). To increase the performance of WA*, we suggest a new parameter, the heuristic angle, which is defined as the angle between the direction of an nth node to the target and the direction of the heading from the (n−1)th node to the nth node on the path. The process of WA*DH involves searching nodes that degrade the optimality of the generated path using the derivative of the heuristic angle, and then searching for escape nodes that avoid an obstacle. Finally, local re-planning of the path is performed using the nodes obtained in the aforementioned two steps. We can verify that the cost of WA*DH is lower than WA*, although the elapsed time is not shorter than WA* because of the additional procedures.