[ACC 2024] Leveraging Computational Fluid Dynamics in UAV Motion Planning

This video demonstrates the hardware experiments associated with the American Control Conference 2024 paper "Leveraging Computational Fluid Dynamics in UAV Motion Planning", by Yunshen Huang, Marcus Greiff, Abraham Vinod, and Stefano Di Cairano. Corresponding author: [e-mail].
Paper: www.merl.com/publications/TR2...
Abstract: We propose a motion planner for quadrotor UAVs in windy environments, where the motion is defined by a sequence of Bézier curves in the flat output space of the UAV. In particular, we focus on how high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulators can be leveraged to improve the planned motions while retaining convexity in the planner. For this purpose, we: (i) identify a model for the UAV-wind interaction; (ii) use the OpenFoam software to compute a model of the wind speeds subject to world geometry and boundary conditions; (iii) describe a method for regressing this wind model into a more compact representation;and finally (iv) demonstrate how this representation is amenable to minimum-snap motion planning of quad-rotor UAVs in realistic environments, demonstrating a significant improvementin the thrust used by the UAV with increasing Newtonian drageffects, this is shown both in theory and in practice.