野外的微型飞行机器人群。
Swarm of micro flying robots in the wild.
机构信息
State Key Laboratory of Industrial Control and Technology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.
Huzhou Institute of Zhejiang University, Huzhou, China.
出版信息
Sci Robot. 2022 May 4;7(66):eabm5954. doi: 10.1126/scirobotics.abm5954.
Aerial robots are widely deployed, but highly cluttered environments such as dense forests remain inaccessible to drones and even more so to swarms of drones. In these scenarios, previously unknown surroundings and narrow corridors combined with requirements of swarm coordination can create challenges. To enable swarm navigation in the wild, we develop miniature but fully autonomous drones with a trajectory planner that can function in a timely and accurate manner based on limited information from onboard sensors. The planning problem satisfies various task requirements including flight efficiency, obstacle avoidance, and inter-robot collision avoidance, dynamical feasibility, swarm coordination, and so on, thus realizing an extensible planner. Furthermore, the proposed planner deforms trajectory shapes and adjusts time allocation synchronously based on spatial-temporal joint optimization. A high-quality trajectory thus can be obtained after exhaustively exploiting the solution space within only a few milliseconds, even in the most constrained environment. The planner is finally integrated into the developed palm-sized swarm platform with onboard perception, localization, and control. Benchmark comparisons validate the superior performance of the planner in trajectory quality and computing time. Various real-world field experiments demonstrate the extensibility of our system. Our approach evolves aerial robotics in three aspects: capability of cluttered environment navigation, extensibility to diverse task requirements, and coordination as a swarm without external facilities.
飞行器机器人得到了广泛应用,但是对于密集森林等高度杂乱的环境,无人机甚至是成群的无人机都无法进入。在这些场景中,未知的周围环境和狭窄的通道,再加上对群体协调的要求,可能会带来挑战。为了实现野外群体导航,我们开发了微型但完全自主的无人机,配备了一个轨迹规划器,可以根据机载传感器的有限信息及时、准确地运行。规划问题满足各种任务要求,包括飞行效率、避障、机器人间避碰、动力学可行性、群体协调等,从而实现了可扩展的规划器。此外,所提出的规划器基于时空联合优化同步地改变轨迹形状和调整时间分配。因此,即使在最受限的环境中,仅通过几毫秒的时间就能在解决方案空间中进行详尽的探索,从而获得高质量的轨迹。该规划器最终集成到了具有机载感知、定位和控制功能的手掌大小的群体平台中。基准比较验证了规划器在轨迹质量和计算时间方面的卓越性能。各种真实世界的野外实验证明了我们系统的可扩展性。我们的方法在三个方面推动了空中机器人技术的发展:复杂环境导航能力、对各种任务要求的可扩展性,以及无需外部设施的群体协调。