RAPTOR: Robust and Perception-Aware Trajectory Replanning for Quadrotor Fast Flight

Recent advances in trajectory replanning have enabled quadrotor to navigate autonomously in unknown environments. However, high-speed navigation still remains a significant challenge. Given very limited time, existing methods have no strong guarantee on the feasibility or quality of the solutions. M...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on robotics 2021-12, Vol.37 (6), p.1992-2009
Main Authors: Zhou, Boyu, Pan, Jie, Gao, Fei, Shen, Shaojie
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aerial systems
Barriers
Collision avoidance
Feasibility
motion and path planning
Motion planning
Navigation
Optimization
Path planning
Perception
perception and autonomy
Robustness
Trajectories
Trajectory planning
Unknown environments
Yaw
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Summary:Recent advances in trajectory replanning have enabled quadrotor to navigate autonomously in unknown environments. However, high-speed navigation still remains a significant challenge. Given very limited time, existing methods have no strong guarantee on the feasibility or quality of the solutions. Moreover, most methods do not consider environment perception, which is the key bottleneck to fast flight. In this article, we present RAPTOR, a robust and perception-aware replanning framework to support fast and safe flight, which addresses these issues systematically. A path-guided optimization approach that incorporates multiple topological paths is devised, to ensure finding feasible and high-quality trajectories in very limited time. We also introduce two perception-aware planning approaches to actively observe and avoid unknown obstacles. A risk-aware trajectory refinement ensures that unknown obstacles which may endanger the quadrotor can be observed earlier and avoid in time. The motion of yaw angle is planned to actively explore the surrounding space that is relevant for safe navigation. The proposed methods are tested extensively through benchmark comparisons and challenging indoor and outdoor aggressive flights. We release our implementation as an open-source package 1 for the community.
ISSN:1552-3098
1941-0468
DOI:10.1109/TRO.2021.3071527