Motion primitives and 3-D path planning for fast flight through a forest

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of motion planning for fast, agile flight through a dense obstacle field. A key contribution is the design of two families of motion primitives for aerial robots flying in dense obstacle fields, along with rules to stitch them together. The primitives are obtained by solving for the flight dynamics of the aerial robot, and explicitly account for limited agility using time delays. The first family of primitives consists of turning maneuvers to link any two points in space. The locations of the terminal points are used to obtain closed-form expressions for the control inputs required to fly between them, while accounting for the finite time required to switch between consecutive sets of control inputs. The second family consists of aggressive turn-around maneuvers wherein the time delay between the angle of attack and roll angle commands is used to optimize the maneuver for the spatial constraints. A 3-D motion planning algorithm based on these primitives is presented for aircraft flying through a dense forest.