Fast Trajectory Planning for Multiple Quadrotors using Relative Safe Flight Corridor

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast trajectory planning method for multiple quadrotors in obstacle-rich environments, utilizing a novel relative safe flight corridor to efficiently generate collision-free paths.

Contribution

It proposes a new relative safe flight corridor (RSFC) concept and integrates it with a graph-based pathfinding and quadratic programming approach for rapid multi-agent trajectory planning.

Findings

Computes collision-free trajectories for 16 agents within a second.

Successfully plans for 64 agents in less than a minute.

Validated through simulation and indoor flight tests.

Abstract

This paper presents a new trajectory planning method for multiple quadrotors in obstacle-dense environments. We suggest a relative safe flight corridor (RSFC) to model safe region between a pair of agents, and it is used to generate linear constraints for inter-collision avoidance by utilizing the convex hull property of relative Bernstein polynomial. Our approach employs a graph-based multi-agent pathfinding algorithm to generate an initial trajectory, which is used to construct a safe flight corridor (SFC) and RSFC. We express the trajectory as a piecewise Bernstein polynomial and formulate the trajectory planning problem into one quadratic programming problem using linear constraints from SFC and RSFC. The proposed method can compute collision-free trajectory for 16 agents within a second and for 64 agents less than a minute, and it is validated both through simulation and indoor flight test.