Planning and control for quadrotor flight through cluttered environments

Previous demonstrations of autonomous quadrotor flight have typically been limited to sparse environments due to the computational burden associated with planning for a large number of obstacles. We hypothesized that it would be possible to do efficient planning and robust execution in obstacle-dense environments using the novel Iterative Regional Inflation by Semidefinite programming algorithm (IRIS), mixed-integer semidefinite programs (MISDP), and model-based control approaches. Here, we present experimental validation of this hypothesis using a small quadrotor in a series of indoor environments including a cubic meter volume containing 20 interwoven strings. We chose one of the smallest hardware platforms available on the market (34g, 92mm rotor to rotor), allowing for these dense environments and explain how to overcome the many system identification, state estimation, and control problems that result from the small size of the platform and the complexity of the environments.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2015

Author dc:creator

• Landry, Benoit, M. Eng. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Russ Tedrake.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/100608

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/100608