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Contribution Details

Type Journal Article
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Title Time-optimal planning for quadrotor waypoint flight
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Philipp Foehn
  • Angel Romero
  • Davide Scaramuzza
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
Journal Title Science Robotics
Publisher American Association for the Advancement of Science
Geographical Reach international
ISSN 2470-9476
Volume 6
Number 56
Page Range 34 - 38
Date 2021
Abstract Text 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.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1126/scirobotics.abh1221
Other Identification Number merlin-id:21590
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