Fast and Safe Aerial Payload Transport in Urban Areas

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive method for fast and safe aerial payload transport in urban environments, combining high-level A* and polynomial planning with low-level feedback linearization control for collision avoidance and trajectory tracking.

Contribution

It introduces an integrated approach that combines high-level motion planning with low-level control for safe, efficient urban aerial payload delivery.

Findings

Successfully plans collision-free trajectories in obstacle-rich environments.

Achieves stable trajectory tracking with feedback linearization control.

Ensures fast arrival times while maintaining safety and rotor speed bounds.

Abstract

This paper studies the problem of fast and safe aerial payload transport by a single quadcopter in urban areas. The quadcopter payload system (QPS) is considered as a rigid body and modeled with a nonlinear dynamics. The urban area is modeled as an obstacle-laden environment with obstacle geometries obtained by incorporating realistic LIDAR data. Our approach for payload transport is decomposed into high-level motion planning and low-level trajectory control. For the low-level trajectory tracking, a feedback linearization control is applied to stably track the desired trajectory of the quadcopter. For high-level motion planning, we integrate A* search and polynomial planning to define a safe trajectory for the quadcopter assuring collision avoidance, boundedness of the quadcopter rotor speeds and tracking error, and fast arrival to a target destination from an arbitrary initial location.