Minimum-Energy Path Generation for a Quadrotor UAV

Fabio Morbidi (1) , Roel Cano (2) , David Lara (2)

1 MIS - Modélisation, Information et Systèmes - UR UPJV 4290
2 Universidad Autónoma de Tamaulipas

A major limitation of existing battery-powered quadrotor UAVs is their reduced flight endurance. To address this issue, by leveraging the electrical model of a brushless DC motor, we explicitly determine minimum-energy paths between a predefined initial and final configuration of a quadrotor by solving an optimal control problem with respect to the angular accelerations of the four propellers. As a variation on this problem, if the total energy consumption between two boundary states is fixed, minimum-time and/or minimum-control-effort trajectories are computed for the aerial vehicle. The theory is illustrated for the DJI Phantom 2 quadrotor in three realistic scenarios.

Mots clés: Quadrotors; Path planning; Energy minimization; Flight endurance

Domaines: Automatique; Robotique [cs.RO]; Systèmes et contrôle [cs.SY]; Vision par ordinateur et reconnaissance de formes [cs.CV]

Fabio Morbidi, Roel Cano, David Lara. Minimum-Energy Path Generation for a Quadrotor UAV. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May 2016, Stockholm, Sweden. ⟨hal-01276199v2⟩