Safe Aerial 3D Path Planning for Autonomous UAVs using Magnetic Potential Fields

Abstract

Safe autonomous Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle (UAV) navigation in urban environments requires real-time path planning that avoids obstacles. MaxConvNet is a potential-field planner that leverages properties of Maxwell's equations to generate a path to the goal without local minima. We extend the 2D MaxConvNet magnetic field planner to 3D, using a convolutional autoencoder to predict obstacle-aware potential fields from LiDAR-derived 101^3 voxel grids. Evaluation across 100 randomized closed-loop trials in two distinct Cosys-AirSim urban environments, a dense night-time cityscape and a suburban district shows a 100% path planning success rate on both maps without retraining. In offline path planning, 3DMaxConvNet produces path lengths comparable to A* on unseen maps while reducing runtime from 0.155--0.17s to 0.087--0.089s, or about 1.7--1.95 times faster than A*. Against RRT*(3k), 3DMaxConvNet achieves similar path quality while reducing planning runtime from 17.2--17.5s to about 0.09s, which is roughly 193--201 times faster than RRT*(3k).