Safe Trajectory Planning for Safety Critical Drone Delivery

Ensuring the safety of a drone over the course of its flight is essential. This work presents a pre-flight planner that can make supported claims about the safety of the system in the case of engine failure, which is cited to be the most damaging failure mode. The developed algorithm utilizes geographical data to generate the shortest trajectory under safety constraints while guaranteeing no violations of restricted airspace. This trajectory is optimized using the A* (A star) algorithm. The generated trajectory performs better in terms of proximity to safe landing spots throughout the course of the flight when compared to a selection of alternative trajectories, while minimizing the total length, as expected.