Flying Through Cluttered and Dynamic Environments With Light Detection and Ranging

Navigating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) through cluttered and dynamic environments is a persistent and significant challenge, particularly when high‐speed obstacles are involved. This article presents a comprehensive light detection and ranging‐based system designed to enable UAVs to effectively avoid various moving obstacles, with a specific focus on high‐speed obstacles, in complex environments. Leveraging the high computational efficiency of its perception and planning modules, the system operates in real time with low latency, even when constrained by limited onboard computing resources. For dynamic environment perception, we incorporate the previously developed M‐detector into the system and develop a dynamic environment perception module, which ensures robust perception of moving objects. To address the challenge of dynamic environment planning, we propose an integrated planning and control framework, referred to as DynIPC. DynIPC anticipates the future trajectories of dynamic objects, enabling proactive avoidance of high‐speed obstacles. The proposed system is validated through both simulations and real‐world experiments. In simulation tests, the system consistently outperforms state‐of‐the‐art baselines across multiple metrics, including success rate, time consumption, average flight time, and maximum velocity. In real‐world trials, the system successfully navigates through cluttered environments such as forests, avoiding multiple moving obstacles along its path with a success rate of 85% in a low latency.