RAPTOR: Robust and Perception-aware Trajectory Replanning for Quadrotor Fast Flight
This work addresses the problem of autonomous fast flight for quadrotors in unknown environments, representing an incremental improvement by integrating perception-aware planning into existing trajectory replanning methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of high-speed quadrotor navigation in unknown environments by introducing RAPTOR, a replanning framework that ensures feasible, high-quality trajectories and actively perceives obstacles, enabling fast and safe flight.
Recent advances in trajectory replanning have enabled quadrotor to navigate autonomously in unknown environments. However, high-speed navigation still remains a significant challenge. Given very limited time, existing methods have no strong guarantee on the feasibility or quality of the solutions. Moreover, most methods do not consider environment perception, which is the key bottleneck to fast flight. In this paper, we present RAPTOR, a robust and perception-aware replanning framework to support fast and safe flight. A path-guided optimization (PGO) approach that incorporates multiple topological paths is devised, to ensure finding feasible and high-quality trajectories in very limited time. We also introduce a perception-aware planning strategy to actively observe and avoid unknown obstacles. A risk-aware trajectory refinement ensures that unknown obstacles which may endanger the quadrotor can be observed earlier and avoid in time. The motion of yaw angle is planned to actively explore the surrounding space that is relevant for safe navigation. The proposed methods are tested extensively. We will release our implementation as an open-source package for the community.