Efficient Trajectory Planning for High Speed Flight in Unknown Environments

There has been considerable recent work in motion planning for UAVs to enable aggressive, highly dynamic flight in known environments with motion capture systems. However, these existing planners have not been shown to enable the same kind of flight in unknown, outdoor environments. In this paper we present a receding horizon planning architecture that enables the fast replanning necessary for reactive obstacle avoidance by combining three techniques. First, we show how previous work in computationally efficient, closed-form trajectory generation method can be coupled with spatial partitioning data structures to reason about the geometry of the environment in real-time. Second, we show how to maintain safety margins during fast flight in unknown environments by planning velocities according to obstacle density. Third, our receding-horizon, sampling-based motion planner uses minimum-jerk trajectories and closed-loop tracking to enable smooth, robust, high-speed flight with the low angular rates necessary for accurate visual-inertial navigation. We compare against two state-of-the-art, reactive motion planners in simulation and benchmark solution quality against an offline global planner. Finally, we demonstrate our planner over 80 flights with a combined distance of 22km of autonomous quadrotor flights in an urban environment at speeds up to 9.4ms $^{-1}$.