Robust and Efficient Quadrotor Trajectory Generation for Fast Autonomous Flight

• Published in: IEEE robotics and automation letters Vol. 4; no. 4; pp. 3529 - 3536
• Main Authors: Zhou, Boyu, Gao, Fei, Wang, Luqi, Liu, Chuhao, Shen, Shaojie
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 01.10.2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: aerial systems: perception and autonomy; Aerospace electronics; collision avoidance; Convexity; Dynamics; Euclidean geometry; Hulls; Motion and path planning; Motion planning; Optimization; Resource management; Robotics; Safety; Smoothness; Splines (mathematics); Trajectory; Trajectory control; Trajectory optimization
• ISSN: 2377-3766; 2377-3766
• DOI: 10.1109/LRA.2019.2927938

In this letter, we propose a robust and efficient quadrotor motion planning system for fast flight in three-dimensional complex environments. We adopt a kinodynamic path searching method to find a safe, kinodynamic feasible, and minimum-time 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 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.