Safety-Driven and Localization Uncertainty-Driven Perception-Aware Trajectory Planning for Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Recent advances in trajectory planning have enabled quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to navigate autonomously in complex environments. However, most of the existing methods do not consider the perception quality and the safety simultaneously. This article proposes a perception-aware trajectory planning strategy for quadrotors, which can ensure the safety and localization accuracy. In contrast to the existing methods, the main idea of the proposed method lies in that the yaw angle trajectory is planned to actively obtain more information in the environment to improve the localization accuracy and keep the safe flight simultaneously. Following the mainstream two-stage motion planning framework, a coarse-to-fine graph search strategy is proposed to search for a safe and perception-aware yaw angle path in the first stage. Specifically, a Yaw Safety Corridor (YSC) is proposed to guarantee the safety, which can observe the obstacles directly along the tangent direction of the position trajectory. In addition, a dedicated map Fisher Information Field (FIF) is employed to evaluate the perception quality. In the second stage, a path-guided optimization method is proposed to quickly generate a safe and perception-aware trajectory. Finally, comparative simulation and real-world experiments are conducted to verify the superior performance in terms of the perception quality and the safety of the proposed method.