Minimal time synthesis for a kinematic drone model

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a (rough) kinematic model for a UAV flying at constant altitude moving forward with positive lower and upper bounded linear velocities and positive minimum turning radius.For this model, we consider the problem of minimizing the time travelled by the UAV starting from a general configuration to connect a specified target being a fixed circle of minimum turning radius.The time-optimal synthesis is presented as a partition of the state space which defines a unique optimal path such that the target can be reached optimally.