FPGA Based Offline 3D UAV Local Path Planner Using Evolutionary Algorithms for Unknown Environments

This paper presents an FPGA based synthesiz able offline UAV local path planner implementation using Evolutionary Algorithms for 3D unknown environments. A Genetic Algorithm is selected as the path planning algorithm and all units of it are executed on a single FPGA board. In this study, Nexys 4 Artix-7 FPGA board is selected as the target device and Xilinx Vivado 2015.4 software is used for synthesis and analysis of HDL design. Local path planner is designed in a way that it has two flight modes: free elevation flight mode and fixed elevation flight mode. Designed FPGA based local path planner which has 74 MHz operating frequency and 62% logic slice utilization is tested into two different unknown environments generated by a LIDAR sensor. Results show that both GAs are efficient path planning algorithms for UAV applications and FPGAs are very suitable platforms for flight planning periphery.