Fast and Safe Aerial Payload Transport in Urban Areas

Abstract: This paper studies the problem of fast and safe aerial payload transport by a single quadcopter in urban areas. The quadcopter payload system (QPS) is considered as a rigid body and modeled with a nonlinear dynamics. The urban area is modeled as an obstacle-laden environment with obstacle geometries obtained by incorporating realistic LIDAR data. Our approach for payload transport is decomposed into high-level motion planning and low-level trajectory control. For the low-level trajectory tracking, a feedback linearization control is applied to stably track the desired trajectory of the quadcopter. For high-level motion planning, we integrate A* search and polynomial planning to define a safe trajectory for the quadcopter assuring collision avoidance, boundedness of the quadcopter rotor speeds and tracking error, and fast arrival to a target destination from an arbitrary initial location.