Benchmarking of Obstacle Field Navigation Algorithms for Unmanned Helicopters

This paper describes a framework for performance evaluation of autonomous guidance systems using benchmarks.The benchmarks consist of six simple problems containing two or fewer geometric primitives, a high resolution height map scanned from an urban area, and a simple vehicle model with hard velocity and acceleration constraints. Performance metrics used to compare trajectories are presented. Two trajectory optimization methods are used to generate near-optimal baseline trajectories: numerical optimization using Nonlinear Programming for simple problems, and the Motion Primitive Automaton for problems with complex terrain. As an example, the Obstacle Field Navigation system developed by the Army Aeroflightdynamics Directorate is compared to the baseline.