Abstract
This work presents a system and approach for the rapid exploration of unknown environments using aerial robots. High-speed flight with multirotor air vehicles is challenging due to limited sensing range, use of onboard computation, and constrained dynamics. For robots operating in unknown environments, the control system must guarantee collision-free operation, and for exploration tasks, the system should also select sensing actions to maximize information gain with respect to the environment. To this end, we present a motion primitive-based, receding-horizon planning approach that maximizes information gain, accounts for platform dynamics, and ensures safe operation. Analysis of motions parallel and perpendicular to frontiers given constraints on sensing and dynamics leads to bounds on safe velocities for exploration. This analysis and the bounds obtained inform the design of the motion primitive approach. Simulation experiments in a complex 3D environment demonstrate the utility of the motion primitive actions for rapid exploration and provide a comparison to a reduced motion primitive library that is appropriate for online planning. Experimental results on a hexarotor robot with the reduced library demonstrate rapid exploration at speeds above 2.25 m/s under a varying clutter in an outdoor environment which is comparable to and exceeding the existing state-of-the-art results.
This work was supported by DOE (DE-EM0004067) and industry.
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Notes
- 1.
The robot may exceed reference speeds due to an error in tracking the position reference because of environmental disturbances and inaccuracies in the system model.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Xuning Yang for help in the discussion and implementation of forward arc motion primitives used in this work.
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Goel, K., Corah, M., Boirum, C., Michael, N. (2021). Fast Exploration Using Multirotors: Analysis, Planning, and Experimentation. In: Ishigami, G., Yoshida, K. (eds) Field and Service Robotics. Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics, vol 16. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9460-1_21
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