10.1016/j.cie.2021.107814
https://zenodo.org/records/5747723
oai:zenodo.org:5747723
Rodríguez, Fabio
Fabio
Rodríguez
Departamento de Matemática Aplicada II, University of Seville, Spain.
Díaz-Báñez, José Miguel
José Miguel
Díaz-Báñez
Departamento de Matemática Aplicada II, University of Seville, Spain.
Sanchez-Laulhe, Ernesto
Ernesto
Sanchez-Laulhe
GRVC Robotics Lab, University of Seville, Spain
Capitán, Jesús
Jesús
Capitán
GRVC Robotics Lab, University of Seville, Spain
Ollero, Anibal
Anibal
Ollero
GRVC Robotics Lab, University of Seville, Spain
Kinodynamic planning for an energy-efficient autonomous ornithopter
Zenodo
2021
Trajectory optimization
ornithopter
motion planning
nonlinear dynamics
2021-11-23
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
This paper presents a novel algorithm to plan energy-efficient trajectories for autonomous ornithopters. In general, trajectory optimization is quite a relevant problem for practical applications with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Even though the problem has been well studied for fixed and rotatory-wing vehicles, there are far fewer works exploring it for flapping-wing UAVs, like ornithopters. These are of interest for many applications where long-flight endurance, but also hovering capabilities, are required.
We propose an efficient approach to plan ornithopter trajectories that minimize energy consumption by combining gliding and flapping maneuvers. Our algorithm builds a tree of dynamically feasible trajectories and it applies heuristic search for efficient online
planning, using reference curves to guide the search and prune states. We present computational experiments to analyze and tune the key parameters, as well as a comparison against a recent alternative probabilistic planner, showing best performance. Finally, we demonstrate how our algorithm can be used for planning perching maneuvers online.