High-Speed Planning in Unknown Environments for Multirotors Considering Drag

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new planning scheme for high-speed flight in an unknown environment while taking into account drag forces. Drag forces become non-negligible at high speeds and may lead to unfeasible trajectories. The method leverages a new Mixed-Integer Quadratic Program/Model Predictive Control formulation that allows to easily account for drag forces. This formulation makes use of a state-of-the-art Safe Corridors generator to guarantee safety. It uses state-of-the-art mapping algorithms and solvers to achieve a higher computational efficiency than similar state-of-the-art methods. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first high-speed planner that generates safe trajectories while accounting for drag. The proposed method is tested in simulation and compared to similar state-of-the-art methods for planning in unknown environments in terms of quality and computation time.