František Nekovář presents Variable Time-step MPC for Agile Multi-rotor UAV Interception of Dynamic Targets

Agile trajectory planning can improve the efficiency of multi-rotor Uncrewed
Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in scenarios with combined task-oriented and kinematic
trajectory planning, such as monitoring spatio-temporal phenomena or
intercepting dynamic targets.
Agile planning using existing non-linear model predictive control methods is
limited by the number of planning steps as it becomes increasingly
computationally demanding.
That reduces the prediction horizon length, leading to a decrease in solution
quality.
Besides, the fixed time-step length limits the utilization of the available UAV
dynamics in the target neighborhood.
In this paper, we propose to address these limitations by introducing variable
time steps and coupling them with the prediction horizon length.
A simplified point-mass motion primitive is used to leverage the differential
flatness of quadrotor dynamics and the generation of feasible trajectories in
the flat output space.
Based on the presented evaluation results and experimentally validated
deployment, the proposed method increases the solution quality by enabling
planning for long flight segments but allowing tightly sampled maneuvering.

Seminar will be held in short format of 20 minutes.
Supporting materials: https://mrs.fel.cvut.cz/vt-mpc