I'm working on a simulation in which I have an aircraft and I need to be able to fly to a starting point of a line. When arriving at that point, it needs to be aligned with the angle of the line. The starting point can be either point on the line. It is similar to simulating an aircraft landing on a runway but I do not need to factor in altitude.
example
I have the following information:
aircraft vector
latitude/longitude
heading
speed
destination line (two points)
point 1 latitude/longitude
point 2 latitude/longitude
Aircraft position is updated every 0.5 second and is limited to 3 degrees per second turn rate.
I am currently using Jean Brouwers python interpretation of geodesy tools (https://github.com/mrJean1/PyGeodesy) for a lot of my trigonometric and vector-based methods.
I'm looking for a way to plot my aircraft to the destination line with the proper heading.
Any help with the rationale or math would be greatly appreciated. It's been a long time since I have done any complex trig.
Thanks
It looks like a problem in a field of Optimal control, if you really want to deal with plane speed and position, not just to build a smooth graph connecting two or three dots.
This is a theory for finding control functions that can bring mathematical systems from one state to another.
Your goal is to represent everything as a system of variables: state variables x(t) (position in rectangular or polar coordinates, direction, speed) and control variables u(t) (throttle position, steering position). Then you describe dependencies between them as a system of differential equations x'(t) = f(x(t), u(t)).
And for that mathematical system, applying constraints s on your control variables and providing sets of target values of state variables, you synthesize a control functions for control variables. Synthesizing relies heavily on Pontryagin's maximum principle.
Check out simple examples of applying the theory, if you can.
Of course, it is a general approach which is used in real aviation and spaceships... Maybe you don't really need this and something simpler's gonna fit :)
Related
I use OpeenStreetMap and the OpenLayers library, I need to build a route inside the polygon as in the mission planner program, here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhHomssqD7k&ab_channel=AeroHawk at 2 minutes you can see how inside the polygon marked with red segments , the program automatically builds a route. How can I replicate this? What is this algorithm?
mission planer
I see you're talking about generating a drone flight path within a polygon, calculating the positions of way points.
Quite a fun challenge! I'll write out in words how the algorithm would work, but doing this in javascript would also be fun!
It should be possible to do this for a given (adjustable) angle of orientation, but I suggest you could simplify things initially by assuming the drone is to fly in passes orientated exactly East <-> West.
That also means the start way point is simply the northernmost corner of the polygon i.e. the vertex with the greatest latitude (Given a polygon with a northern edge like the one pictured, it doesn't matter which of the two top corners is the start point). Likewise the final way point is straightforward. The southernmost corner of the polygon.
We need to caculate all the waypoints in between. A series of locations on the left and right to create this laddered effect. Perhaps you'll want to start by building two lines (or ordered arrays of corner points) representing the left and right sides. The algrithm needs to "walk" down these sides, so maintain a lastLeft and lastRight point which are both intialised to the start of their lines. For both lines this is the start point at the top.
Each "walk step" down a line is going involve some calculation (sub-function!). They'll be a configured "gap" between the drone passes. This delta-latitude will be used at this point. For each walk step we're starting from the last point (lastLeft or lastRight) and so we've got a target latitude. targetLat = lastLeft.lat - gap. In a loop we can walk to the next point of the line (corner of the original polygon) if that lies within the gap, i.e. the latitude of that point is > targetLat. Another edge case is if the next point is actually the end point (break! we're done!). But otherwise we've got an edge that crosses the targetLat. We do the geometric calculation to find the point along the edge where it crosses the targetLat*. That point is our next way point!
*Geometric calculation to find the point along a line which has the targetLat? Possibly this part is do-able with something like TurfJS, although I couldn't tell you exactly which library call. But having worked out the rest of the algorithm, personally I'd probably just the code linear maths directly. You have known start and end to the line, therefore a known gradient. Take that and apply it to the known delta-lat to find the delta-lon.
We need to follow that algorithm for a "walk step", walking down the left line and then down the right line, and then down the right line and then down the left line, generating the ladder shaped series of way points all the way down to the end!
Say we are coding something in Javascript and we have a body, say an apple, and want to detect collision of a rock being thrown at it: it's easy because we can simply consider the apple as a circle.
But how about we have, for example, a "very complex" fractal? Then there is no polygon similar to it and we also cannot break it into smaller polygons without a herculean amount of effort. Is there any way to detect perfect collision in this case, as opposed to making something that "kind" of works, like considering the fractal a polygon (not perfect because there will be collision detected even in blank spaces)?
You can use a physics editor
https://www.codeandweb.com/physicseditor
It'll work with most game engines. You'll have to figure how to make it work in JS.
Here's an tutorial from the site using typescript - related to JS
http://www.gamefromscratch.com/post/2014/11/27/Adventures-in-Phaser-with-TypeScript-Physics-using-P2-Physics-Engine.aspx
If you have coordinates of the polygons, you can make an intersection of subject and clip polygons using Javascript Clipper
The question doesn't provide too much information of the collision objects, but usually anything can be represented as polygon(s) to certain precision.
EDIT:
It should be fast enough for real time rendering (depending of complexity of polygons). If the polygons are complex (many self intersections and/or many points), there are many methods to speedup the intersection detection:
reduce the point count using ClipperLib.JS.Lighten(). It removes the points that have no effect to the outline (eg. duplicate points and points on edge)
get first bounding rectangles of polygons using ClipperLib.JS.BoundsOfPath() or ClipperLib.JS.BoundsOfPaths(). If bounding rectangles are not in collision, there is no need to make intersection operation. This function is very fast, because it just gets min/max of x and y.
If the polygons are static (ie their geometry/pointdata doesn't change during animation), you can lighten and get bounds of paths and add polygons to Clipper before animation starts. Then during each frame, you have to do only minimal effort to get the actual intersections.
EDIT2:
If you are worried about the framerate, you could consider using an experimental floating point (double) Clipper, which is 4.15x faster than IntPoint version and when big integers are needed in IntPoint version, the float version is 8.37x faster than IntPoint version. The final speed is actually a bit higher because IntPoint Clipper needs that coordinates are first scaled up (to integers) and then scaled down (to floats) and this scaling time is not taken into account in the above measurements. However float version is not fully tested and should be used with care in production environments.
The code of experimental float version: http://jsclipper.sourceforge.net/6.1.3.4b_fpoint/clipper_unminified_6.1.3.4b_fpoint.js
Demo: http://jsclipper.sourceforge.net/6.1.3.4b_fpoint/main_demo3.html
Playground: http://jsbin.com/sisefo/1/edit?html,javascript,output
EDIT3:
If you don't have polygon point coordinates of your objects and the objects are bitmaps (eg. png/canvas), you have to first trace the bitmaps eg. using Marching Squares algorithm. One implementation is at
https://github.com/sakri/MarchingSquaresJS.
There you get an array of outline points, but because the array consists of huge amount of unneeded points (eg. straight lines can easily be represented as start and end point), you can reduce the point count using eg. ClipperLib.JS.Lighten() or http://mourner.github.io/simplify-js/.
After these steps you have very light polygonal representations of your bitmap objects, which are fast to run through intersection algorithm.
You can create bitmaps that indicate the area occupied by your objects in pixels. If there is intersection between the bitmaps, then there is a collision.
I'm hitting a wall in some work I'm doing; I've searched on here for many, many threads regarding numerical interpolation and have found them either to contain too much math for me to interpret them, or that their coding solutions have been too specific to be generalized to the task I'm working on.
I have sets of coordinates (currently float x, y distances around an 0,0 origin point) which I am, via Javascript, transposing to latitude, longitude coordinates. (The transposition is easy, so don't worry about that — I'm just telling you that to make the application more clear.)
For the rest, refer to the below graphic:
The dots are the coordinates. (They are generated algorithmically.) The blue line shows a simple, linear interpolation between the points. What I want is something more like the red line. It's not quite an ellipse — you can see that around the first coordinates, it forms arcs that are almost like a perfect circle.
Note that some of the points are negative in various places. Note that the lines between them must be draw sequentially — an algorithm that generates the points out of sequence will make things much harder for this application.
What I'd like is to have a Javascript function that would let me do the following: specify two sequential points from this series (x1,y1; x2,y2), specify a number of interpolated steps in between (say, 5 to 10), and then output an array of coordinates that would, when linked linearly (that is, when a straight line is drawn between them), look something like the red line above (with the degree of curviness obviously constrained by the number of steps).
Of all of the many spline functions out there, which of these satisfies these requirements? The mathematical precision of the spline function is less important to me than the simplicity of adapting it to this purpose, and to its aesthetic output. I would be fine with manually setting the eccentricity/circle-ness of each individual set of coordinates, too (so the first ones really should be very circle-like, but the latter should not be).
Put another way, I am looking for a simple function for getting the interior coordinates of an arc between any two sets of coordinates. EDIT to clarify that I'm fine with there being a third variable that sets the inclination of the arc (positive or negative) and its eccentricity or whatever. The function doesn't necessarily have to know where it is on the diagram above, as I will know that. I'm just looking for something that can help me interpolate the arc points.
I think I understand the parameters of the problem; what I'm bad at is geometry and turning mathematical answers into usable Javascript. (Because I don't really understand the math.)
I have already looked at Midpoint circle algorithm and found it difficult to adapt to this purpose (because of the need for sequentiality and non-integer coordinates); I've also looked at a variety of spline interpolation methods and found them way too complicated for my dummy-self to make sense of.
Any pointers, help, and code would be appreciated!
I have an exercise in problem solving for those who like that kind of thing. I'm working on a mapping application that uses Google Maps. A user first enters a series of coordinates and a "radius". The user then requests either a line or an area be plotted. The plots are taking place on Google Maps using polygons. In other words, given the blue line (or area) defined by the blue points and a distance, calculate the red points and draw the red polygon where the edges are of the given distance away from the user-provided edges:
I have managed to get this to work in "most" situations by calculate forward and reverse bearings, then finding the points with a bearing 90 degrees off these in the appropriate direction. For the arcs I just calculated the location points along that arc at 5 degree intervals. In the case of the inside of an acute angle, I determine where the two lines intersect and use that point, but this fails miserably sometimes when the cross-track distance at that point is greater than the radius that was provided.
I'm hoping someone knows of an easier way? Maybe one that works all the time regardless of the ratio of the cross-track to radius distances? Or maybe a library already exists to do this?
I hope what I'm trying to do makes sense... It's hard to put in words. Maybe if I had the words a search would have been helpful even.
Well, the answer turned out to be simpler than I thought. It took me back to a lesson I was taught during CompSci 101 almost 15 years ago:
"Use existing libraries whenever possible."
Once I found out (via googling), that what I'm looking for isn't called an "offset" or a "scale" but is actually called a "buffer" in GIS computing, it was simple. There are some great libraries like Clipper by Angus Johnson that can do it, but I wanted something JavaScript specific.
That brought me to arcGIS's GeometryService. They even have a Google Maps version but it's only API v2. Luckily, there's an official, unsupported version I found via the arcGIS forums that works with GMaps API v3.
So, my solution was to use that, called arcgislink, and it's buffer function works perfectly with Google Maps LatLng points, Google Maps Polygons/Polylines, and any of the standard arcGIS types. Anyone else needing to do this with Google Maps, I highly recommend looking at their libraries.
In the general setting, this problem is quite difficult because it is a global one (you cannot just solve locally, at each polygon vertex but just handling the two incoming edges). And also uneasy because it involves circular arcs.
There is a solution which is quite unefficient but safe: assume you have a general polygon union algorithm (like http://gvu.gatech.edu/~jarek/graphics/papers/04PolygonBooleansMargalit.pdf); you will add inflated versions of every edge one by one (every time a rectangle and two half-disks approximated by polygons), together with the original polygon for closed shapes.
For the sake of efficiency, you can design a "sweepline" algorithm that works by slicing the plane with horizontal lines at every "event point", i.e. segment/arc endpoints and arc apexes, so that the configuration in every slice is simpler. Do you see what I mean ?
BTW, what do you call the "cross-track distance" ?
I'm working on a html map maker, and i'd like to offer our users the ability to create shapes quickly by clicking in a zone instead of having them define the shape manually.
First let's have a look at what we're doing for the moment. The user would like to map the area A. What he has to do is click multiple times on each point to define the boundaries of the shape.
I'd like to know is if there is an algorithm that would allow the user to click in the A area and could determine what points to dispose in order to create an near-optimal shape following the shape boundaries - based on the image contrast.
My first idea to handle this was to determine the furthest points up, left, down, right from the clicked point. Set these four points as our starting points. Then for each segment, subdivide it with a new point and move the new point along the vector normal until i hit a contrasted edge.
Of course, there are some limitations to this approach, but here is what i can assume
the shape can be convex, concave, etc...
the contrast should be black against white but to handle possible evolutions the contrast treshold should be configurable.
in the example i've been thinking about above, there would obviously be a limit to the subdivision depth in order not to kill the users machine
If any of you know about such an alogrithm, that would be really great.
Have a look at Region Growing algorithms. This is basically the same as the flood-fill algorithm described above by tokland in the basic case.
This seems like a hard problem (btw, I don't know about a specific algorithm for this). My 2 cents:
Use a flood-fill algorithm, but instead of getting the whole surface, get only the perimeter.
Take a starting point of the perimeter and go in one way; when you detect that the accumulated quadratic error between the virtual segment (current point - initial point) and the real perimeter goes over a threshold, put a point there and start again till you get to the starting point.
The first step seems pretty easy, the second is harder.
You may use an Edge Detection Algorithm (EDA).
In Javascript you may use Pixastic, or roll your own.
After being processed by the EDA, your image gets to:
After that, simply throw any line in any direction from your interior point to the first white pixel, and follow the contour.