Why Change Your Controller When You Can Change Your Planner: Drag-Aware Trajectory Generation for Quadrotor Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Zhang, Hanli, Srikanthan, Anusha, Folk, Spencer, Kumar, Vijay, Matni, Nikolai
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Zhang, Hanli
Srikanthan, Anusha
Folk, Spencer
Kumar, Vijay
Matni, Nikolai
author_facet Zhang, Hanli
Srikanthan, Anusha
Folk, Spencer
Kumar, Vijay
Matni, Nikolai
contents Motivated by the increasing use of quadrotors for payload delivery, we consider a joint trajectory generation and feedback control design problem for a quadrotor experiencing aerodynamic wrenches. Unmodeled aerodynamic drag forces from carried payloads can lead to catastrophic outcomes. Prior work model aerodynamic effects as residual dynamics or external disturbances in the control problem leading to a reactive policy that could be catastrophic. Moreover, redesigning controllers and tuning control gains on hardware platforms is a laborious effort. In this paper, we argue that adapting the trajectory generation component keeping the controller fixed can improve trajectory tracking for quadrotor systems experiencing drag forces. To achieve this, we formulate a drag-aware planning problem by applying a suitable relaxation to an optimal quadrotor control problem, introducing a tracking cost function which measures the ability of a controller to follow a reference trajectory. This tracking cost function acts as a regularizer in trajectory generation and is learned from data obtained from simulation. Our experiments in both simulation and on the Crazyflie hardware platform show that changing the planner reduces tracking error by as much as 83%. Evaluation on hardware demonstrates that our planned path, as opposed to a baseline, avoids controller saturation and catastrophic outcomes during aggressive maneuvers.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_04960
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Why Change Your Controller When You Can Change Your Planner: Drag-Aware Trajectory Generation for Quadrotor Systems
Zhang, Hanli
Srikanthan, Anusha
Folk, Spencer
Kumar, Vijay
Matni, Nikolai
Robotics
Machine Learning
Systems and Control
Motivated by the increasing use of quadrotors for payload delivery, we consider a joint trajectory generation and feedback control design problem for a quadrotor experiencing aerodynamic wrenches. Unmodeled aerodynamic drag forces from carried payloads can lead to catastrophic outcomes. Prior work model aerodynamic effects as residual dynamics or external disturbances in the control problem leading to a reactive policy that could be catastrophic. Moreover, redesigning controllers and tuning control gains on hardware platforms is a laborious effort. In this paper, we argue that adapting the trajectory generation component keeping the controller fixed can improve trajectory tracking for quadrotor systems experiencing drag forces. To achieve this, we formulate a drag-aware planning problem by applying a suitable relaxation to an optimal quadrotor control problem, introducing a tracking cost function which measures the ability of a controller to follow a reference trajectory. This tracking cost function acts as a regularizer in trajectory generation and is learned from data obtained from simulation. Our experiments in both simulation and on the Crazyflie hardware platform show that changing the planner reduces tracking error by as much as 83%. Evaluation on hardware demonstrates that our planned path, as opposed to a baseline, avoids controller saturation and catastrophic outcomes during aggressive maneuvers.
title Why Change Your Controller When You Can Change Your Planner: Drag-Aware Trajectory Generation for Quadrotor Systems
topic Robotics
Machine Learning
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.04960