The Design of Autonomous UAV Prototypes for Inspecting Tunnel Construction Environment

This article presents novel designs of autonomous UAV prototypes specifically developed for inspecting GPS-denied tunnel construction environments with dynamic human and robotic presence. Our UAVs integrate advanced sensor suites and robust motion planning algorithms to autonomously navigate and explore these complex environments. We validated our approach through comprehensive simulation experiments in PX4 Gazebo and Airsim Unreal Engine 4 environments. Real-world wind tests and exploration experiments demonstrate the UAVs' capability to operate stably under diverse environmental conditions without GPS assistance. This study highlights the practicality and resilience of our UAV prototypes in real-world applications.

DPMPC-Planner: A real-time UAV trajectory planning framework for complex static environments with dynamic obstacles

Safe UAV navigation is challenging due to the complex environment structures, dynamic obstacles, and uncertainties from measurement noises and unpredictable moving obstacle behaviors. Although plenty of recent works achieve safe navigation in complex static environments with sophisticated mapping algorithms, such as occupancy map and ESDF map, these methods cannot reliably handle dynamic environments due to the mapping limitation from moving obstacles. To address the limitation, this paper proposes a trajectory planning framework to achieve safe navigation considering complex static environments with dynamic obstacles. To reliably handle dynamic obstacles, we divide the environment representation into static mapping and dynamic object representation, which can be obtained from computer vision methods. Our framework first generates a static trajectory based on the proposed iterative corridor shrinking algorithm. Then, reactive chance-constrained model predictive control with temporal goal tracking is applied to avoid dynamic obstacles with uncertainties. The simulation results in various environments demonstrate the ability of our algorithm to navigate safely in complex static environments with dynamic obstacles.