Reactive Trajectory Generation in an Unknown Environment
This work addresses trajectory generation for UAVs in unknown environments, which is an incremental improvement for autonomous navigation systems.
The paper tackles the problem of generating smooth, collision-free trajectories for UAVs in unknown environments with wind disturbances, using only onboard sensors and local communication, and demonstrates its performance in simulations with moving obstacles.
Autonomous trajectory generation for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in unknown environments continues to be an important research area as UAVs become more prolific. We define a trajectory generation algorithm for a vehicle in an unknown environment with wind disturbances, that relies only on the vehicle's on-board distance sensors and communication with other vehicles within a finite region to generate a smooth, collision-free trajectory up to the fourth derivative. The proposed trajectory generation algorithm can be used in conjunction with high-level planners and low-level motion controllers. The algorithm provides guarantees that the trajectory does not violate the vehicle's thrust limitation, sensor constraints, or a user-defined clearance radius around other vehicles and obstacles. Simulation results of a quadrotor moving through an unknown environment with a moving obstacle demonstrates the trajectory generation performance.