Primitive-Planner: An Ultra Lightweight Quadrotor Planner with Time-optimal Primitives

TL;DR

Primitive-Planner introduces an ultra lightweight quadrotor trajectory planner that uses time-optimal motion primitives, enabling fast, safe, and efficient flight path generation with minimal online computation.

Contribution

It presents a novel offline-generated library of time-optimal, feasible motion primitives and a fast collision checking method, reducing online computation while ensuring high-quality trajectories.

Findings

Shortest flight time and distance achieved in benchmarks

Lowest computational overload among compared methods

Validated robustness through real-world experiments

Abstract

It is a significant requirement for a quadrotor trajectory planner to simultaneously guarantee trajectory quality and system lightweight. Many researchers focus on this problem, but there's still a gap between their performance and our common wish. In this paper, we propose an ultra lightweight quadrotor planner with time-optimal primitives. Firstly, a novel motion primitive library is proposed to generate time-optimal and dynamical feasible trajectories offline. Secondly, we propose a fast collision checking method with a deterministic time consumption, independent of the sampling resolution of the primitives. Finally, we select the minimum cost trajectory to execute among the safe primitives based on user-defined requirements. The propsed transformation relation between the local trajectories ensures the smoothness of the global trajectory. The planner reduces unnecessary online computing power consumption as much as possible, while ensuring a high-quality trajectory. Benchmark comparisons show that our method can generate the shortest flight time and distance of trajectory with the lowest computation overload. Challenging real-world experiments validate the robustness of our method.