Trajectory Planning for Quadrotor Swarms

We describe a method for multirobot trajectory planning in known, obstacle-rich environments. We demonstrate our approach on a quadrotor swarm navigating in a warehouse setting. Our method consists of following three stages: 1) roadmap generation that generates sparse roadmaps annotated with possibl...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIEEE transactions on robotics Vol. 34; no. 4; pp. 856 - 869
Main Authors Honig, Wolfgang, Preiss, James A., Kumar, T. K. Satish, Sukhatme, Gaurav S., Ayanian, Nora
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York IEEE 01.08.2018
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects
Collision avoidance
Computer simulation
Computing time
Downwash
Multiple robots
Multirobot systems
quadrotor
Robots
Rotary wing aircraft
Schedules
swarm
Trajectory optimization
Trajectory planning
unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)
Vehicle dynamics
Warehouses
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Summary:We describe a method for multirobot trajectory planning in known, obstacle-rich environments. We demonstrate our approach on a quadrotor swarm navigating in a warehouse setting. Our method consists of following three stages: 1) roadmap generation that generates sparse roadmaps annotated with possible interrobot collisions; 2) discrete planning that finds valid execution schedules in discrete time and space; 3) continuous refinement that creates smooth trajectories. We account for the downwash effect of quadrotors, allowing safe flight in dense formations. We demonstrate computational efficiency in simulation with up to 200 robots and physical plausibility with an experiment on 32 nano-quadrotors. Our approach can compute safe and smooth trajectories for hundreds of quadrotors in dense environments with obstacles in a few minutes.
ISSN:1552-3098
1941-0468
DOI:10.1109/TRO.2018.2853613