Risk-aware Trajectory Sampling for Quadrotor Obstacle Avoidance in Dynamic Environments

TL;DR

This paper introduces a risk-aware, sampling-based trajectory planning method using a dual-structure particle map for quadrotor obstacle avoidance in dynamic environments, enabling safe and efficient flight.

Contribution

It presents a novel DSP dynamic occupancy map and a risk-aware sampling planner that handles arbitrary obstacle shapes and integrates with global trajectories.

Findings

Outperforms existing methods in dynamic obstacle avoidance.

Achieves real-time flight at 6 m/s in controlled tests.

Operates efficiently on low-cost hardware.

Abstract

Obstacle avoidance of quadrotors in dynamic environments is still a very open problem. Current works commonly leverage traditional static maps to represent static obstacles and the detection and tracking of moving objects (DATMO) method to model dynamic obstacles separately. The detection module requires pre-training, and the dynamic obstacles can only be modeled with certain shapes, such as cylinders or ellipsoids. This work utilizes the dual-structure particle-based (DSP) dynamic occupancy map to represent the arbitrary-shaped static obstacles and dynamic obstacles simultaneously, and proposes an efficient risk-aware sampling-based local trajectory planner to realize safe flights in this map. The trajectory is planned by sampling motion primitives generated in the state space. Each motion primitive is divided into two phases: a short-term phase with a strict risk limitation and a relatively long-term phase designed to avoid high-risk regions. The risk is evaluated with the predicted particle-form future occupancy status, considering the time dimension. With an approach to split from and merge to an arbitrary global trajectory, the planner can also be used in the tasks with preplanned global trajectories. Comparison experiments show that the obstacle avoidance system composed of the DSP map and our planner performs the best in dynamic environments. In real-world tests, our quadrotor reaches a speed of 6 m/s with the motion capture system and 2.5 m/s with everything running on a low-price single-board computer.