Path planning of rotorcrafts in unknown environment

In this paper, we introduced an online path planning method which is able to be implemented on micro rotorcrafts with limited payload and computational power. The method enables automatic flight of such vehicles in GPS-denied and obstacle-strewn environments by adopting efficient trajectory generation algorithms. A series of two point boundary value problem (TPBVP) is solved analytically to formulate the overall path. Advantages of the proposed approach includes its stability and efficiency thanks to the closed-form solution to each trajectory segment. The result has been realized and demonstrated on real rotorcrafts. The video of flight tests can be found at: http://uav.ece.nus.edu.sg/robust-online-path-planning-Lai2015.html