Disturbance-Aware Flight for Aerial Robots in Narrow Space
For aerial robotics, this work addresses the challenge of safe and efficient flight in confined environments by incorporating disturbance estimation into motion planning, reducing conservative behaviors.
This paper presents a disturbance-aware planning and control framework (DAPCF) for quadrotor flight in narrow spaces, integrating online disturbance estimation to adaptively modulate speed and compensate for aerodynamic disturbances. Experiments show a quadrotor can traverse tunnels as narrow as 0.6 m, outperforming human pilots in success rate and flight efficiency.
Autonomous flight of aerial robots in narrow space remains challenging due to strong aerodynamic disturbances and limited flying space. Existing approaches mainly address aerodynamic disturbances at the control level, while motion planning typically relies on geometric constraints and fixed speed limits, leading to conservative or unsafe behaviors in confined environments. This paper presents a disturbance-aware planning and control framework (DAPCF) that integrates online disturbance estimation into the planning-control loop for quadrotor flight in narrow space. First, the dual-loop observers estimate 6-degree-of-freedom disturbance forces and torques in real time based on odometry and motor speed measurements. Then, a disturbance risk function is introduced that adaptively modulates the reference speed of the planner based on disturbance estimation, reducing velocity when disturbances exceed a threshold and restoring it under low-disturbance conditions. Finally, a motor-dynamics-based nonlinear model predictive controller (MDNMPC) with disturbance compensation is designed to ensure robust trajectory tracking under perturbed conditions. Experiments demonstrate that a quadrotor with a diagonal length of 0.39~m can traverse straight, sloped, and curved tunnels as narrow as 0.6~m, outperforming human pilots in both success rate and flight efficiency.