Kinodynamic planning for an energy-efficient autonomous ornithopter

Abstract

This paper presents a novel algorithm to plan energy-efficient trajectories for autonomous ornithopters. In general, trajectory optimization is quite a relevant problem for practical applications with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Even though the problem has been well studied for fixed and rotatory-wing vehicles, there are far fewer works exploring it for flapping-wing UAVs, like ornithopters. These are of interest for many applica- tions where long-flight endurance, but also hovering capabilities, are required. We propose an efficient approach to plan ornithopter trajectories that minimize energy consumption by combining gliding and flapping maneu- vers. Our algorithm builds a tree of dynamically feasible trajectories and it applies heuristic search for efficient online planning, using reference curves to guide the search and prune states. We present computational ex- periments to analyze and tune the key parameters, as well as a comparison against a recent alternative proba- bilistic planner, showing best performance. Finally, we demonstrate how our algorithm can be used for planning perching maneuvers online