Robust and Efficient Quadrotor Trajectory Generation for Fast Autonomous Flight

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a robust and efficient quadrotor motion planning system for fast flight in 3-D complex environments. We adopt a kinodynamic path searching method to find a safe, kinodynamic feasible and minimumtime initial trajectory in the discretized control space. We improve the smoothness and clearance of the trajectory by a B-spline optimization, which incorporates gradient information from a Euclidean distance field (EDF) and dynamic constraints efficiently utilizing the convex hull property of B-spline. Finally, by representing the final trajectory as a non-uniform B-spline, an iterative time adjustment method is adopted to guarantee dynamically feasible and non-conservative trajectories. We validate our proposed method in various complex simulational environments. The competence of the method is also validated in challenging real-world tasks. We release our code as an open-source package 1 .

Perception-aware Path Planning for UAVs using Semantic Segmentation

“…Instead, we employ semantics to evaluate the quality of both the candidate areas for navigation and the landmarks. We propose a path-planning pipeline building on top of [19] able to incorporate this additional information in order to encourage the navigation through informative regions of the space and to favor the triangulation of high-quality landmarks. Our approach shows noticeable improvements in state estimation performance when compared to a purely reactive planning strategy and the perception-aware planner proposed by [3].…”

“…The proposed path-searching module builds on top of the kinodynamic A * algorithm presented in [19]. Similarly to the original implementation, we use motion primitives instead of straight lines as graph edges in order to respect the multicopter's dynamics.…”

“…After expansion and pruning, the remaining primitives are checked for safety and dynamic feasibility. Finally, in order to improve the chances of reaching the goal, we adopt the analytic expansion strategy detailed in [19]. The path search is limited to the position of the robot in R 3 , and thanks to the differential flatness of multirotor systems [25], the trajectory is represented as three, independent, timeparametrized polynomial functions p(t):…”

Robust autonomous flight in cluttered environment using a depth sensor

“…In recent years, the work from Zhou et al. 30 relies on the use of a B-Spline for trajectory generation and optimization. The experiments’ results show their approach can improve the efficiency and convergence rate of trajectory optimizations.…”

FIESTA : fast incremental euclidean distance fields for online motion planning of aerial robots

“…The quadrotor plans to fly to a designated destination through the maze. [8] is used for motion planning. (a) shows the quadrotor in the experiment, (b) is the corresponding visulization of FIESTA, where cubes are obstacles, plane is one slice of ESDF map, yellow and red lines are the planned trajectory.…”