Adaptive motion planning for terrain following quadrotors

This paper presents a new approach for navigating a quadrotor over undulated terrains that can be of great importance for the use of unmanned aerial vehicles in civilian applications such as monitoring of pipes, bridges and buildings. The proposed approach involves the use of a single-beam LiDAR to estimate the terrain profile under uncertainty. The LiDAR is installed at the base of a quadrotor and can be set at different angles to send information to the quadrotor about undulations of the terrain ahead. This strategy helps the quadrotor to build a smooth trajectory for the UAV and allows the controller to follow it closely. In turn, maneuverability of UAVs over and around ground-based obstacles is improved significantly in comparison to typical default autopilot controllers programmed to maintain the UAV at a given altitude. Through simulation, the result shows how this prospective technique with motion planning algorithms improves the performance of the quadrotor.