Real-time Dynamic-consistent Motion Planning for Over-actuated UAVs

Existing motion planning approaches for over-actuated unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platforms can achieve online planning without considering dynamics. However, in many envisioned application areas such as aerial manipulation, payload delivery, and moving target tracking, it is critical to ensure dynamic consistency in the generated trajectory. The dynamics of these platforms introduce a high nonlinearity, leading to a substantial increase in computational burden. This paper presents an efficient method to plan motions that are consistent with the dynamics of over-actuated UAVs. With a hierarchical control structure, the dimension of the optimization problem is greatly reduced with synthesized wrench commands. Additionally, by exploring the dynamics of over-actuated UAVs, the complex planning process is decoupled into two simpler sub-problems. As a result, the proposed planner can be solved as two small quadratic programmings (QPs) and deployed in real-time. The computational efficiency and dynamic consistency of the proposed method are verified through both simulations and experiments, including comparison with other approaches and dynamic target tracking.