Flight With Limited Field of View: A Parallel and Gradient-Free Strategy for Micro Aerial Vehicle
Hanchen Lu, Qun Zong, Shupeng Lai, Bailing Tian, Lihua Xie · IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics · 2021
In this article, a parallel and gradient-free strategy is presented for autonomous navigation of a quadrotor with a limited field of view (FOV). The FOV constraint is nonlinear and noncontinuous in general and involves higher order dynamics of the vehicle. Planning problems with such constraints are difficult to solve, especially with the real-time requirement. The proposed method first constructs an environment map by integrating the measurement of a limited-FOV sensor in a parallel process. Based on the map, it then selects a feasible local goal from a global path and generates a constraint-free nominal control sequence. Finally, a stochastic optimal control problem is solved to satisfy the limited FOV constraint, the dynamic constraint, and the collision-free conditions at the same time. The objective functions are nonlinear and noncontinuous and involves dynamic of MAV. A parallel-gradient-free algorithm is used to address these problems. Both the sensing and planning problems are solved parallelly on a lightweight graphics processing unit. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is demonstrated through both simulation and real-flight experiments.