Energy efficiency path planning for a quadrotor aerial vehicle

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles are used today in many real-world applications. In all these applications, the vehicle endurance (flight time) is an important constraint that affects mission success. This study investigates the limitations of embedded energy for a quadrotor aerial vehicle. We consider a quadrotor simple tasked to travel from an initial hover configuration to a final hover configuration. In order to have a precise approximation of the consumed energy, we propose a power consumption model with battery dynamic, motor dynamic, and rotor efficiency function. We then introduce an optimization algorithm to minimize the energy consumption during quadrotor aerial vehicle mission. The proposed algorithm is based on an optimal control problem formulated for the quadrotor model and solved using nonlinear programming. In the optimal control problem, we seek to find control inputs (rotor velocity) and vehicle trajectory between initial and final configurations that minimize the consumed energy during a point-to-point mission. We extensively test in simulation experiments the proposed algorithm under normal and windy weather conditions. We compare the proposed optimization method with a nonlinear adaptive control approach to highlight the saved amount of energy.