Time-Continuous Real-Time Trajectory Generation for Safe Autonomous Flight of a Quadrotor in Unknown Environment

• Main Authors: Yonghee Park, Woosung Kim, Hyungpil Moon
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-04-01
• Series: Applied Sciences
• Subjects: quadrotor; trajectory generation; replanning
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/11/7/3238

In this paper, we present an efficient global and local replanning method for a quadrotor to complete a flight mission in a cluttered and unmapped environment. A minimum-snap global path planner generates a global trajectory that comprises some waypoints in a cluttered environment. When facing unexpected obstacles, our method modifies the global trajectory using geometrical planning and closed-form formulation for an analytical solution with 9th-order polynomial. The proposed method provides an analytical solution, not a numerical one, and it is computationally efficient without falling into a local minima problem. In a simulation, we show that the proposed method can fly a quadrotor faster than the numerical method in a cluttered environment. Furthermore, we show in experiments that the proposed method can provide safer and faster trajectory generation than the numerical method in a real environment.