Minimum-Length Point-to-Line Path Planning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This paper presents a method of finding the shortest path for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) flying from an initial point to a target line at a constant altitude. The length of a Dubins path is derived as a function of the final position on the line and then differentiated to obtain its extreme value. The primary contribution of the study is a simple analytical solution to determine the minimum-length Dubins path from an initial position to a target line with initial and final orientations given. The proposed method is demonstrated with numerical examples.