Programming drones to navigate and avoid obstacles at a high speed is not always straightforward. Researchers at Aerospace Controls Laboratory have developed a collision avoidance algorithm, the Triple Integrator Planner, that creates collision-free, dynamically feasible paths within 5ms of receiving a point cloud.
As the researchers explain, this is achieved by:
1) planning with instantaneous perception data, 2) using the closed-form solution to a minimum-time optimal control problem to generate motion primitives online, and 3) intelligently sampling motion primitives for collisions.
Drones equipped with this solution will be able to navigate through unknown environments using sensors and on-board computing. An Intel RealSense camera is used for perception. The above video provides you an explanation on how it works.
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