Design and Evaluation of Motion Planners for Quadrotors in Environments with Varying Complexities

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive framework for designing and evaluating motion planners for quadrotors across environments of varying complexity, emphasizing the importance of environment characterization and flexible software integration.

Contribution

It develops a procedure to construct parametrized environments, metrics to assess planning difficulty, and an open-source software stack for combining two-stage planners.

Findings

Geometric front-ends suffice in complex environments when paired with dynamics-aware backends.

Designed metrics accurately reflect planning difficulty.

Software facilitates seamless integration of diverse planners.

Abstract

Motion planning techniques for quadrotors have advanced significantly over the past decade. Most successful planners have two stages: a front-end that determines a path that incorporates geometric (or kinematic or input) constraints and specifies the homotopy class of the trajectory, and a back-end that optimizes this path to respect dynamics and input constraints. While there are many different choices for each stage, the eventual performance depends critically not only on these choices, but also on the environment. Given a new environment, it is difficult to decide a priori how one should design a motion planner. In this work, we develop (i) a procedure to construct parametrized environments, (ii) metrics that characterize the difficulty of motion planning in these environments, and (iii) an open-source software stack that can be used to combine a wide variety of two-stage planners seamlessly. We perform experiments in simulations and a real platform. We find, somewhat conveniently, that geometric front-ends are sufficient for environments with varying complexities if combined with dynamics-aware backends. The metrics we designed faithfully capture the planning difficulty in a given environment. All code is available at https://github.com/KumarRobotics/kr_mp_design