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Time-Optimal Planning for Quadrotor Waypoint Flight (Science Robotics 2021)

UZH Robotics and Perception Group
17.8K subscribers
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61K views 3 years ago
Quadrotors are among the most agile flying robots. However, planning time-optimal trajectories at the actuation limit through multiple waypoints remains an open problem. This is crucial for applications such as inspection, delivery, search and rescue, and drone racing. Early works used polynomial trajectory formulations, which do not exploit the full actuator potential because of their inherent smoothness. Recent works resorted to numerical optimization but require waypoints to be allocated as costs or constraints at specific discrete times. However, this time allocation is a priori unknown and renders previous works incapable of producing truly time-optimal trajectories. To generate truly time-optimal trajectories, we propose a solution to the time allocation problem while exploiting the full quadrotor’s actuator potential. We achieve this by introducing a formulation of progress along the trajectory, which enables the simultaneous optimization …...more
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Time-Optimal Planning for Quadrotor Waypoint Flight (Science Robotics 2021)
673Likes
61,497Views
2021Jul 21
Quadrotors are among the most agile flying robots. However, planning time-optimal trajectories at the actuation limit through multiple waypoints remains an open problem. This is crucial for applications such as inspection, delivery, search and rescue, and drone racing. Early works used polynomial trajectory formulations, which do not exploit the full actuator potential because of their inherent smoothness. Recent works resorted to numerical optimization but require waypoints to be allocated as costs or constraints at specific discrete times. However, this time allocation is a priori unknown and renders previous works incapable of producing truly time-optimal trajectories. To generate truly time-optimal trajectories, we propose a solution to the time allocation problem while exploiting the full quadrotor’s actuator potential. We achieve this by introducing a formulation of progress along the trajectory, which enables the simultaneous optimization of the time allocation and the trajectory itself. We compare our method against related approaches and validate it in real-world flights in one of the world’s largest motion-capture systems, where we outperform human expert drone pilots in a drone-racing task. Reference: P. Foehn, A. Romero, D. Scaramuzza "Time-Optimal Planning for Quadrotor Waypoint Flight" Science Robotics, July 21, 2021 PDF: http://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/docs/ScienceRob... For more info about our research page on : 1. Drone Racing: http://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/research_drone_... 2. Agile Drone Flight: http://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/aggressive_flig... Affiliations: All the authors are with the Dept. of Informatics, University of Zurich, and Dept. of Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, Switzerland http://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/ Music Credits: scottholmesmusic.com under Free Creative Commons License

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UZH Robotics and Perception Group

17.8K subscribers