A Novel Interactive System for Quadrotor Path Planning in Cluttered Outdoor Environments

In this paper, we present a new system framework for generating collision-free trajectories based on Octomap transformed from 3D point cloud for quadrotor's autonomous flight in cluttered outdoor environments. In order to make the quadrotor autonomously navigate in woods, we utilize a 3D laser scanner to acquire laser point cloud and build Octomap of the woods. Then a modified RRT* algorithm is proposed to generate a set of collision-free waypoints and a curve fitting algorithm is adopted to get a smooth minimum snap trajectory. Finally, simulation and experiments are both conducted to show the validity and practicality of the proposed approach.

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