Real-time Planning of Minimum-time Trajectories for Agile UAV Flight

TL;DR

This paper presents a real-time, minimum-time trajectory planning method for agile UAVs that leverages a novel iterative thrust decomposition and multi-waypoint optimization, enabling fast, accurate, and computationally efficient flight path generation.

Contribution

It introduces a new iterative thrust decomposition algorithm combined with a multi-waypoint gradient-based optimization for real-time minimum-time trajectory planning on UAVs.

Findings

Trajectories are generated within milliseconds.

Achieves high-speed flight with up to 3.5g acceleration and over 100 km/h.

Results show comparable or smaller tracking errors than full multirotor models.

Abstract

We address the challenge of real-time planning of minimum-time trajectories over multiple waypoints, onboard multirotor UAVs. Previous works demonstrated that achieving a truly time-optimal trajectory is computationally too demanding to enable frequent replanning during agile flight, especially on less powerful flight computers. Our approach overcomes this stumbling block by utilizing a point-mass model with a novel iterative thrust decomposition algorithm, enabling the UAV to use all of its collective thrust, something previous point-mass approaches could not achieve. The approach enables gravity and drag modeling integration, significantly reducing tracking errors in high-speed trajectories, which is proven through an ablation study. When combined with a new multi-waypoint optimization algorithm, which uses a gradient-based method to converge to optimal velocities in waypoints, the proposed method generates minimum-time multi-waypoint trajectories within milliseconds. The proposed approach, which we provide as open-source package, is validated both in simulation and in real-world, using Nonlinear Model Predictive Control. With accelerations of up to 3.5g and speeds over 100 km/h, trajectories generated by the proposed method yield similar or even smaller tracking errors than the trajectories generated for a full multirotor model.