Peihan Zhang

Gang Chen, Peng Peng, Peihan Zhang et al.

Obstacle avoidance of quadrotors in dynamic environments is still a very open problem. Current works commonly leverage traditional static maps to represent static obstacles and the detection and tracking of moving objects (DATMO) method to model dynamic obstacles separately. The detection module requires pre-training, and the dynamic obstacles can only be modeled with certain shapes, such as cylinders or ellipsoids. This work utilizes the dual-structure particle-based (DSP) dynamic occupancy map to represent the arbitrary-shaped static obstacles and dynamic obstacles simultaneously, and proposes an efficient risk-aware sampling-based local trajectory planner to realize safe flights in this map. The trajectory is planned by sampling motion primitives generated in the state space. Each motion primitive is divided into two phases: a short-term phase with a strict risk limitation and a relatively long-term phase designed to avoid high-risk regions. The risk is evaluated with the predicted particle-form future occupancy status, considering the time dimension. With an approach to split from and merge to an arbitrary global trajectory, the planner can also be used in the tasks with preplanned global trajectories. Comparison experiments show that the obstacle avoidance system composed of the DSP map and our planner performs the best in dynamic environments. In real-world tests, our quadrotor reaches a speed of 6 m/s with the motion capture system and 2.5 m/s with everything running on a low-price single-board computer.

Peihan Zhang, Gang Chen, Yuzhu Li et al.

The vision-based relative localization can provide effective feedback for the cooperation of aerial swarm and has been widely investigated in previous works. However, the limited field of view (FOV) inherently restricts its performance. To cope with this issue, this letter proposes a novel distributed active vision-based relative localization framework and apply it to formation control in aerial swarms. Inspired by bird flocks in nature, we devise graph-based attention planning (GAP) to improve the observation quality of the active vision in the swarm. Then active detection results are fused with onboard measurements from Ultra-WideBand (UWB) and visual-inertial odometry (VIO) to obtain real-time relative positions, which further improve the formation control performance of the swarm. Simulations and experiments demonstrate that the proposed active vision system outperforms the fixed vision system in terms of estimation and formation accuracy.