Motion Planning Framework for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Dynamic Environments

Sammanfattning: The usage of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to navigate autonomously in a dynamic environment is becoming more common. It is important that a UAV can generate collision-free trajectories and also be able to modify them to adapt to environment changes over the entire duration of navigation. The objective of this thesis is to present an optimized motion planning framework for UAV in dynamic environments. The proposed framework consists of two modules, which are optimized motion planner and dynamic scene generator. The optimized motion planner utilizes an asymptotically optimal sampling-based motion planning algorithm, RRTX, and extends RRTX with an optimizer based on Covariant Hamiltonian Optimization for Motion Planning (CHOMP) algorithm to optimize trajectories. A dynamic environment has obstacles that unpredictably appear, disappear or move. The optimized motion planner reacts to environment changes and finds collision-free trajectories during the navigation. Dynamic scene generator contains an obstacle information messenger and UAV simulator. This module is to simulate UAV, obstacles, and planned trajectories in a Unity scene. UAV simulator utilizes Flightmare, which is a flexible modular quadrotor simulator that contains a rendering engine built on Unity and a physics engine for dynamics simulation. The built framework is evaluated in simulations and the results show that the framework enables a UAV to navigate autonomously without colliding with any obstacles in dynamic environments.