Online generation of collision-free trajectories for quadrotor flight in unknown cluttered environments
Jing Chen, Tianbo Liu, Shaojie Shen
Abstract
We present an online method for generating collision-free trajectories for autonomous quadrotor flight through cluttered environments. We consider the real-world scenario that the quadrotor aerial robot is equipped with limited sensing and operates in initially unknown environments. During flight, an octree-based environment representation is incrementally built using onboard sensors. Utilizing efficient operations in the octree data structure, we are able to generate free-space flight corridors consisting of large overlapping 3-D grids in an online fashion. A novel optimization-based method then generates smooth trajectories that both are bounded entirely within the safe flight corridor and satisfy higher order dynamical constraints. Our method computes valid trajectories within fractions of a second on a moderately fast computer, thus permitting online re-generation of trajectories for reaction to new obstacles. We build a complete quadrotor testbed with onboard sensing, state estimation, mapping, and control, and integrate the proposed method to show online navigation through complex unknown environments.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{icra2016_onlinegeneration,
title = {Online generation of collision-free trajectories for quadrotor flight in unknown cluttered environments},
author = {Jing Chen and Tianbo Liu and Shaojie Shen},
booktitle = {ICRA 2016},
year = {2016}
}