Safety-Critical Rapid Aerial Exploration of Unknown Environments

Abstract

This paper details a novel approach to collision avoidance for aerial vehicles that enables high-speed flight in uncertain environments. This framework is applied at the controller level and provides safety regardless of the planner that is used. The method is shown to be robust to state uncertainty and disturbances, and is computed entirely online utilizing the full nonlinear system dynamics. The effectiveness of this method is shown in a high-fidelity simulation of a quadrotor with onboard sensors rapidly and safely exploring a cave environment utilizing a simple planner.