System and method for clearance-based taxi route planning
AssigneeThe Boeing Company
InventorCharles A. Erignac
Life of this patent
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Abstract
Systems and methods for autonomous taxi route planning for an aircraft. Clearance communication is received from a ground control station. A planning problem is generated from the clearance communication and sent to a route planner. The route planner receives the planning problem and plans an executable taxi route. Planning the executable taxi route can include generating a complete breadth first search graph from a start pose to a destination, pruning the graph, minimizing the graph, refining the graph, and extracting the shortest path from the graph.
Claims20
A system for autonomous taxi route planning for an aircraft, the system comprising:
- a processor;
- and
- memory, the memory storing instructions, when executed by the processor, cause the processor to:
- receive a route planning problem, generated from a clearance command received at the aircraft from a ground control station and comprising a sequence of named places, which include one or more taxiways, to a named destination on an airport ground, wherein each taxiway has a guideline;
- and
- autonomously generate an executable taxi route corresponding to the planning problem by:
- iterating through a plurality of stages, wherein the stages comprise one or more data structures that associate a start pose of the aircraft and each of the sequence of named places with a set of zones and a plurality of vertices and associates the named destination with one or more goal poses, wherein at least one of the named places is a taxiway that has a plurality of associated zones, and
- selecting the executable taxi route through the associated zones of the taxiways that minimizes free space moves, wherein the free space moves are not along any guidelines of the taxiways.
A system for autonomous taxi route planning for an aircraft, the system comprising:
- a clearance manager configured to generate a planning problem based on a clearance command received at the aircraft from a ground control station and comprising a sequence of named places, which include one or more taxiways, to a named destination on an airport ground, wherein each taxiway has a guideline;
- and
- a route planner configured to generate a planned taxi route from the planning problem by performing the following operations:
- iterating through a plurality of stages, wherein the stages comprise one or more data structures that associate a start pose of the aircraft and each of the sequence of named places with a set of zones and a plurality of vertices and associates the named destination with one or more goal poses, wherein at least one of the named places is a taxiway that has a plurality of associated zones, and
- selecting the planned taxi route through the associated zones of the taxiways that minimizes free space moves, wherein the free space moves are not along any guidelines of the taxiways.
A method for generating a route graph for autonomous taxi route planning for an aircraft, the method comprising:
- receiving a clearance command the aircraft from a ground control station, the clearance command comprising a sequence of named places, which include one or more taxiways, to a named destination on an airport ground, wherein each taxiway has a guideline;
- building the route graph by:
- iterating through a plurality of stages, wherein the stages comprise one or more data structures that associate a start pose of the aircraft and each of the sequence of named places with a set of zones and a plurality of vertices and associates the named destination with one or more goal poses, wherein at least one of the named places is a taxiway that has a plurality of associated zones, and
- selecting the route graph through the associated zones of the taxiways that minimizes free space moves, wherein the free space moves are not along any guidelines of the taxiways.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.