Configuration-Induced Passive Self-Rotation for Perception-Enhanced Autonomous Flight
For autonomous drones operating in confined spaces, this provides an airframe-level mechanism to improve sensing coverage without additional sensors, though the improvement is incremental over existing passive rotation methods.
This work introduces a passively self-rotating tricopter that uses a rear-arm configuration parameter to balance swept-FoV refresh rate and flight performance, enabling perception-enhanced autonomous flight in cluttered environments. Real-world experiments demonstrate high-speed trajectory tracking, disturbance rejection, and autonomous navigation.
Autonomous flight in confined and cluttered environments is fundamentally limited by the restricted field of view (FoV) of onboard sensors. Passive self-rotation expands sensing coverage without additional sensors but introduces a tradeoff between swept-FoV refresh rate and flight performance. This letter presents a configuration-induced passively self-rotating tricopter for perception-enhanced autonomous flight. Firstly, the rear-arm configuration parameter is exploited to regulate the passive self-rotation operating point, providing an airframe-level mechanism for balancing swept-FoV refresh rate and flight performance. Secondly, a hierarchical autonomy framework integrating planning and control is developed to enable agile and robust autonomous flight under continuous passive self-rotation. For waypoint-based inspection, guide-point replanning is further used to improve task-level coverage. Extensive real-world experiments, including high-speed trajectory tracking, disturbance-rejection tests, and autonomous navigation in representative cluttered environments, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for perception-enhanced autonomous flight.