Real-time Trajectory Generation for Quadrotors using B-spline based Non-uniform Kinodynamic Search
This addresses the problem of safe and efficient drone navigation for robotics applications, representing an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles real-time trajectory generation for quadrotors in cluttered environments by using B-spline-based non-uniform kinodynamic search, achieving higher performance than state-of-the-art methods in simulations and hardware experiments.
In this paper, we propose a time-efficient approach to generate safe, smooth and dynamically feasible trajectories for quadrotors in obstacle-cluttered environment. By using the uniform B-spline to represent trajectories, we transform the trajectory planning to a graph-search problem of B-spline control points in discretized space. Highly strict convex hull property of B-spline is derived to guarantee the dynamical feasibility of the entire trajectory. A novel non-uniform kinodynamic search strategy is adopted, and the step length is dynamically adjusted during the search process according to the Euclidean signed distance field (ESDF), making the trajectory achieve reasonable time-allocation and be away from obstacles. Non-static initial and goal states are allowed, therefore it can be used for online local replanning as well as global planning. Extensive simulation and hardware experiments show that our method achieves higher performance comparing with the state-of-the-art method.