Robust and Efficient Quadrotor Trajectory Generation for Fast Autonomous Flight
This work addresses the challenge of enabling efficient and robust autonomous flight for quadrotors in cluttered settings, representing an incremental improvement in trajectory generation methods.
The paper tackles the problem of generating fast, safe trajectories for quadrotors in complex 3D environments by proposing a motion planning system that combines kinodynamic path searching, B-spline optimization, and iterative time adjustment, resulting in validated performance in simulations and real-world tasks.
In this paper, we propose a robust and efficient quadrotor motion planning system for fast flight in 3-D 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 (EDF) 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.