Generating Minimum-Snap Quadrotor Trajectories Really Fast

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast, numerically stable algorithm for generating large-scale minimum-snap trajectories for quadrotors, enabling real-time planning of extremely long paths with over 500,000 segments.

Contribution

The proposed algorithm achieves linear computational complexity and high numerical stability, allowing for real-time generation of very large trajectories, outperforming existing methods.

Findings

Algorithm handles over 500,000 segments efficiently

It is faster than current state-of-the-art methods

Successfully demonstrated on real quadrotor flight

Abstract

We propose an algorithm for generating minimum-snap trajectories for quadrotors with linear computational complexity with respect to the number of segments in the spline trajectory. Our algorithm is numerically stable for large numbers of segments and is able to generate trajectories of more than $500,000$ segments. The computational speed and numerical stability of our algorithm makes it suitable for real-time generation of very large scale trajectories. We demonstrate the performance of our algorithm and compare it to existing methods, in which it is both faster and able to calculate larger trajectories than state-of-the-art. We also show the feasibility of the trajectories experimentally with a long quadrotor flight.