Technical Report: Safe, Aggressive Quadrotor Flight via Reachability-based Trajectory Design

Quadrotors can provide services such as infrastructure inspection and\nsearch-and-rescue, which require operating autonomously in cluttered\nenvironments. Autonomy is typically achieved with receding-horizon planning,\nwhere a short plan is executed while a new one is computed, because sensors\nreceive limited information at any time. To ensure safety and prevent robot\nloss, plans must be verified as collision free despite uncertainty (e.g,\ntracking error). Existing spline-based planners dilate obstacles uniformly to\ncompensate for uncertainty, which can be conservative. On the other hand,\nreachability-based planners can include trajectory-dependent uncertainty as a\nfunction of the planned trajectory. This work applies Reachability-based\nTrajectory Design (RTD) to plan quadrotor trajectories that are safe despite\ntrajectory-dependent tracking error. This is achieved by using zonotopes in a\nnovel way for online planning. Simulations show aggressive flight up to 5 m/s\nwith zero crashes in 500 cluttered, randomized environments.\n

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