Minimum-energy path generation for a quadrotor UAV

Fabio Morbidi; Roel Cano; David Lara

ICRA 2016150 citations

Minimum-energy path generation for a quadrotor UAV

Abstract

A major limitation of existing battery-powered quadrotor UAVs is their reduced flight endurance. To address this issue, by leveraging the electrical model of a brushless DC motor, we explicitly determine minimum-energy paths between a predefined initial and final configuration of a quadrotor by solving an optimal control problem with respect to the angular accelerations of the four propellers. As a variation on this problem, if the total energy consumption between two boundary states is fixed, minimum-time and/or minimum-control-effort trajectories are computed for the aerial vehicle. The theory is illustrated for the DJI Phantom 2 quadrotor in three realistic scenarios.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{icra2016_minimumenergypat,
  title = {Minimum-energy path generation for a quadrotor UAV},
  author = {Fabio Morbidi and Roel Cano and David Lara},
  booktitle = {ICRA 2016},
  year = {2016}
}