Trajectory planner for agile flights in unknown environments

Planning high-speed trajectories for UAVs in unknown environments requires extremely fast algorithms able to solve the trajectory generation problem in real-time in order to be able to react quickly to the changing knowledge of the world and that guarantee safety at all times. In this thesis, we first show the computational intractability of solving the planning problem by using the full nonlinear dynamics of the UAV in a complex cluttered known environment. By making use of the differential flatness of the UAV and removing the assumption of a completely known world, we then use a convex decomposition of the space and reformulate the optimization problem of the local planner as a Mixed Integer Quadratic Program (MIQP). The formulation proposed enables the solver to choose the interval allocation (i.e. which interval of the trajectory belongs to which polytope), and the time allocation is computed efficiently using the results of the previous replanning iteration.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Tordesillas Torres, Jesús.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Jonathan P. How.

• Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

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

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/122420

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/122420