Unmapped areas and aerodynamic disturbances render autonomous navigation with quadrotors extremely challenging. To fly safely and efficiently, trajectory planners and trackers must be able to navigate unknown environments with unpredictable aerodynamic effects in real-time. When encountering aerodynamic effects such as strong winds, most current approaches to quadrotor trajectory planning and tracking will not attempt to deviate from a determined plan, even if it is risky, in the hope that any aerodynamic disturbances can be resisted by a robust controller. This paper presents a novel systematic trajectory planning and tracking framework for autonomous quadrotors. We propose a Kinodynamic Jump Space Search (Kino-JSS) to generate a safe and efficient route in unknown environments with aerodynamic disturbances. A real-time Gaussian Process is employed to model the effects of aerodynamic disturbances, which we then integrate with a Model Predictive Controller to achieve efficient and accurate trajectory optimization and tracking. We demonstrate our system to improve the efficiency of trajectory generation in unknown environments by up to 75% in the cases tested, compared with recent state-of-the-art. We also demonstrate that our system improves the accuracy of tracking in selected environments with unpredictable aerodynamic effects.
Wireless recharging by autonomous power delivery vehicles is an attractive maintenance solution for Internet of Things devices. Improving the operating efficiency of power delivery vehicles is challenging due to complex dynamic environments and the need to solve difficult optimization problems to determine the best combination of routes, number of vehicles, and numerous safety thresholds prior to deployment. The optimal recharge scheduling problem considers minimizing discharged energy of drones while maximizing devices' recharged energy. In this paper, a configurable optimal recharge scheduler is proposed that incorporates several evolutionary and clustering approaches. A modified version of the Black Hole algorithm is presented, which is shown to execute on average 35% faster than the state of the art genetic approach, while delivering comparable performance in simulation across 18 scenarios with varying area and density of sensor nodes deployed under different initialization scenarios.
This paper presents a novel trajectory tracker for autonomous quadrotor navigation in dynamic and complex environments. The proposed framework integrates a distributional Reinforcement Learning (RL) estimator for unknown aerodynamic effects into a Stochastic Model Predictive Controller (SMPC) for trajectory tracking. Aerodynamic effects derived from drag forces and moment variations are difficult to model directly and accurately. Most current quadrotor tracking systems therefore treat them as simple 'disturbances' in conventional control approaches. We propose Quantile-approximationbased Distributional Reinforced-disturbance-estimator, an aerodynamic disturbance estimator, to accurately identify disturbances, i.e., uncertainties between the true and estimated values of aerodynamic effects. Simplified Affine Disturbance Feedback is employed for control parameterization to guarantee convexity, which we then integrate with a SMPC to achieve sufficient and non-conservative control signals. We demonstrate our system to improve the cumulative tracking errors by at least 66% with unknown and diverse aerodynamic forces compared with recent state-of-the-art. Concerning traditional Reinforcement Learning's non-interpretability, we provide convergence and stability guarantees of Distributional RL and SMPC, respectively, with non-zero mean disturbances.
Recharging Internet of Things devices using autonomous robots is an attractive maintenance solution. Ensuring efficient and reliable performance of autonomous power delivery vehicles is very challenging in dynamic environments. Our work considers a hybrid Travelling Salesman Problem and Orienteering Problem scenario where the optimization objective is to jointly minimize discharged energy of the power delivery vehicle and maximize recharged energy of devices. This is decomposed as an NP-hard nonconvex optimization and nonlinear integer programming problem. Many studies have demonstrated satisfactory performance of heuristic algorithms' ability to solve specific routing problems, however very few studies explore online updating (i.e., mission re-planning 'on the fly') for such hybrid scenarios. In this paper, we present a novel lightweight and reliable mission planner that solves the problem by combining offline search and online reevaluation. We propose Rapid Online Metaheuristic-based Planner, ROMP, a multi-objective offline and online mission planner that can incorporate real-time state information from the power delivery vehicle and its local environment to deliver reliable, up-to-date and near-optimal mission planning. We supplement Guided Local Search (via Google OR-Tools) with a Black Hole-inspired algorithm. Our results show that the proposed solver improves the solution quality offered by Guided Local Search in most of the cases tested. We also demonstrate latency performance improvements by applying a parallelization strategy.
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