Aggressive flight of fixed-wing and quadrotor aircraft in dense indoor environments

Abstract

In this paper, we describe trajectory planning and state estimation algorithms for aggressive flight of micro aerial vehicles in known, obstacledense environments. Finding aggressive but dynamically feasible and collision-free trajectories in cluttered environments requires trajectory optimization and state estimation in the full state space of the vehicle, which is usually computationally infeasible on realistic time scales for real vehicles and sensors. We first build on previous work of van Nieuwstadt and Murray [51] and Mellinger and Kumar [38], to show how a search process can be coupled with optimization in the output space of a differentially flat vehicle model to find aggressive trajectories that utilize the full maneuvering capabilities of a quadrotor. We further extend this work to vehicles with complex, Dubins-type dynamics and present a novel trajectory representation called a Dubins-Polynomial trajectory, which allows us to optimize trajectories for fixed-wing vehicles. To provide accurate state estimation for aggressive flight, we show how the Gaussian particle filter can be extended to allow laser range finder localization to be combined with a Kalman filter. This formulation allows similar estimation accuracy to particle filtering in the full vehicle state but with an order of magnitude more efficiency. We conclude with experiments demonstrating the execution of quadrotor and fixed-wing trajectories in cluttered environments. We show results of aggressive flight at speeds of up to 8 m/s for the quadrotor and 11 m/s for the fixed-wing aircraft.

Quantifying uncertainty in high-resolution remotely sensed topographic surveys for ephemeral gully channel monitoring

“…Field measurements of landforms have increased significantly worldwide, driven by the availability of new surveying technologies. Recent improvements include, but are not limited to, aerial and terrestrial light detection and ranging (lidar) systems (Kukko et al, 2012;Vinci et al, 2015;Eitel et al, 2016;Hawdon et al, 2016), integrated unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) utilizing both photogrammetric and lidar payloads (Bachrach et al, 2012;Bry et al, fort within the scientific community to collect morphological data in a dependable and reproducible manner, specifically when performing long-term process investigation studies .…”

Robust Optimal Adaptive Trajectory Tracking Control of Quadrotor Helicopter

“…In Guerrero-Castellanose et al (2011), by using nested saturation functions, a quaternion-based bounded control method is presented. In Cutler and How (2012) and Bry et al (2015), to incorporate physical constraints on actuators of variable-pitch quadrotor, minimum-time path between any two waypoints in space is generated. This technique provides smooth reference inputs, capability of aerobatic maneuvers, and aggressive flight.…”

Flying on point clouds: Online trajectory generation and autonomous navigation for quadrotors in cluttered environments

“…There has been much research on developing autonomous quadrotor systems. Among these works, some focus on the perception functionality (Bry, Richter, Bachrach, & Roy, ; Faessler et al, ; S. Shen, Michael, & Kumar, ) and some present complete system results (Fang et al, ; Lin et al, ; Mohta et al, ). In this study, we propose a motion planning framework for the safe navigation of an autonomous quadrotor.…”