Multi-stage Optimal Control Problem Formulation for Drone Racing Through Gates and Tunnels

Finding a time-optimal trajectory through gates and tunnels is a difficult challenge in autonomous drone racing, especially in a fully autonomous context where the computations are all performed onboard. This paper presents an optimal control problem formulation to represent and solve the motion planning problem for a multi rotor drone racing through a series of gates or tunnels, without a priori knowledge about the drone pose right in front of or behind the gates nor about the exact time instance when to pass through the gates. The formulation is shown to produce feasible trajectories for a set of handcrafted configurations, and has the potential to be fast enough for online replanning purposes.