Sparse Tangential Network (SPARTAN): Motion Planning for Micro Aerial Vehicles - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University

Sparse Tangential Network (SPARTAN): Motion Planning for Micro Aerial Vehicles

Conference Paper, Proceedings of (ICRA) International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pp. 2820 - 2825, May, 2013

Abstract

Micro aerial vehicles operating outdoors must be able to maneuver through both dense vegetation and across empty fields. Existing approaches do not exploit the nature of such an environment. We have designed an algorithm which plans rapidly through free space and is efficiently guided around obstacles. In this paper we present SPARTAN (Sparse Tangential Network) as an approach to create a sparsely connected graph across a tangential surface around obstacles. We find that SPARTAN can navigate a vehicle autonomously through an outdoor environment producing plans 172 times faster than the state of the art (RRT*). As a result SPARTAN can reliably deliver safe plans, with low latency, using the limited computational resources of a lightweight aerial vehicle.

BibTeX

@conference{Cover-2013-7705,
author = {Hugh Cover and Sanjiban Choudhury and Sebastian Scherer and Sanjiv Singh},
title = {Sparse Tangential Network (SPARTAN): Motion Planning for Micro Aerial Vehicles},
booktitle = {Proceedings of (ICRA) International Conference on Robotics and Automation},
year = {2013},
month = {May},
pages = {2820 - 2825},
keywords = {Motion-Planning, UAV, Visibility Graph},
}