Online environmentally adaptive trajectory planning for rotorcraft unmanned aerial vehicles

Purpose This paper aims to propose an environmentally adaptive trajectory planning system considering the dynamic characteristics of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and the distance between obstacles and the UAV. The system generates a smooth and safe flight trajectory online. Design/methodology/approach First, the hybrid A* search method considering the dynamic characteristics of the quadrotor is used to find the collision-free initial trajectory. Then, environmentally adaptive velocity cost is designed for environment-adaptive trajectory optimization using environmental gradient data. The proposed method adaptively adjusts the autonomous flight speed of the UAV. Finally, the initial trajectory is applied to the multi-layered optimization framework to make it smooth and dynamically viable. Findings The feasibility of the designed system is validated by online flight experiments, which are in unknown, complex situations. Practical implications The proposed trajectory planning system is integrated into a vision-based quadrotor platform. It is easily implementable onboard and computationally efficient. Originality/value A hybrid A* path searching method is proposed to generate feasible motion primitives by dispersing the input space uniformly. The proposed method considers the control input of the UAV and the search time as the heuristic cost. Therefore, the proposed method can provide an initial path with the minimum flying time and energy loss that benefits trajectory optimization. The environmentally adaptive velocity cost is proposed to adaptively adjust the flight speed of the UAV using the distance between obstacles and the UAV. Furthermore, a multi-layered environmentally adaptive trajectory optimization framework is proposed to generate a smooth and safe trajectory.