Real-time Planning of Minimum-time Trajectories for Agile UAV Flight

We address the challenge of real-time planning of minimum-time trajectories over multiple waypoints, onboard multirotor UAVs. Previous works demonstrated that achieving a truly time-optimal trajectory is computationally too demanding to enable frequent replanning during agile flight, especially on less powerful flight computers. Our approach overcomes this stumbling block by utilizing a point-mass model with a novel iterative thrust decomposition algorithm, enabling the UAV to use all of its collective thrust, something previous point-mass approaches could not achieve. The approach enables gravity and drag modeling integration, significantly reducing tracking errors in high-speed trajectories, which is proven through an ablation study. When combined with a new multi-waypoint optimization algorithm, which uses a gradient-based method to converge to optimal velocities in waypoints, the proposed method generates minimum-time multi-waypoint trajectories within milliseconds. The proposed approach, which we provide as open-source package, is validated both in simulation and in real-world, using Nonlinear Model Predictive Control. With accelerations of up to 3.5g and speeds over 100 km/h, trajectories generated by the proposed method yield similar or even smaller tracking errors than the trajectories generated for a full multirotor model.

Reference:
K. Teissing, M. Novosad, R. Penicka and M. Saska, "Real-Time Planning of Minimum-Time Trajectories for Agile UAV Flight," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 9, no. 11, pp. 10351-10358, Nov. 2024, doi: 10.1109/LRA.2024.3471388.

Paper: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/...
Full-text: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.16074
Code: https://github.com/ctu-mrs/pmm_uav_pl...

For more about our research check our pages http://mrs.fel.cvut.cz/

Affiliations: Krystof Teissing, Matej Novosad, Robert Penicka, Martin Saska are with Multi-robot Systems Group, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic. http://mrs.felk.cvut.cz/