PE-Planner

PE-Planner is a performance-enhanced quadrotor motion planner for autonomous flight in complex and dynamic environments. It is proposed to significantly improve the performance of speed, safety, and disturbance rejection capability.

Authors: Jiaxin Qiu (Code Contributor), Qingchen Liu, Jiahu Qin, Dewang Cheng, Yawei Tian and Qichao Ma

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Table of Contents

• Installation
• Run Simulations

1. Installation

The project is developed on Ubuntu 20.04 (ROS Noetic). In simulations, it uses Gazebo as the simulator and PX4 as flight control software to achieve relatively realistic simulations. To avoid tedious configuration steps, a Docker image containing the simulation environment and PE-Planner is provided. Running the following commands to setup:

docker pull kuguao/pe-planner-simulation-env:latest

If your computer has an NVIDIA device, run

docker run -it --ipc=host --volume="/tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix:rw" --gpus all --env="DISPLAY" --env="NVIDIA_DRIVER_CAPABILITIES=all" --env="QT_X11_NO_MITSHM=1" --name="pe-planner" kuguao/pe-planner-simulation-env:latest

Otherwise, run

docker run -it --ipc=host --volume="/tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix:rw" --env="DISPLAY" --name="pe-planner" kuguao/pe-planner-simulation-env:latest

2. Run Simulations

Simulation of the Nominal Case with Static Obstacles

Open three terminals to run commands individually and sequentially.

Terminal 1:

docker exec -it pe-planner /bin/bash
cd ~/pe-planner-simulation
./startpx4.sh

Terminal 2:

xhost +
docker exec -it pe-planner /bin/bash
cd ~/pe-planner-simulation/PE-Planner
git checkout static_env_simulation
rviz -d ./rviz/rviz.rviz

Terminal 3:

docker exec -it pe-planner /bin/bash
cd ~/pe-planner-simulation/PE-Planner
./build.sh
./build/planner_px4 ./maps/map3.txt 1 1 6.0 3.0 1.0 25

The format of the command to run PE-Planner is

./build/planner_px4 [map_file] [enable MPCC (disabled it to use PID for comparison)] [enable GPIO] [max velocity in Kinodynamic searching] [max acceleration in Kinodynamic searching] [mu] [number of tests]

Simulation of the Nominal Case with Static and Dynamic Obstacles

Terminal 1:

docker exec -it pe-planner /bin/bash
cd ~/pe-planner-simulation
./startpx4.sh

Terminal 2:

xhost +
docker exec -it pe-planner /bin/bash
cd ~/pe-planner-simulation/PE-Planner
git checkout dynamic_env_simulation
rviz -d ./rviz/rviz.rviz

Terminal 3:

docker exec -it pe-planner /bin/bash
cd ~/pe-planner-simulation/PE-Planner
./build.sh
./build/planner_px4 ./maps/map2.txt 1 1 6.0 3.0 1.0 25 0

The format of the command to run PE-Planner is

./build/planner_px4 [map_file] [enable MPCC (disabled it to use PID for comparison)] [enable GPIO] [max velocity in Kinodynamic searching] [max acceleration in Kinodynamic searching] [mu] [number of tests] [enable dynamic planning (disable it when enabling MPCC)]

Simulation of the Case with Disturbance

Terminal 1:

docker exec -it pe-planner /bin/bash
cd ~/pe-planner-simulation
./startpx4.sh

Terminal 2:

xhost +
docker exec -it pe-planner /bin/bash
cd ~/pe-planner-simulation/PE-Planner
git checkout disturbance_simulation
rviz -d ./rviz/rviz.rviz

Terminal 3:

docker exec -it pe-planner /bin/bash
cd ~/pe-planner-simulation/PE-Planner
./build.sh
./build/planner_px4 ./maps/map2.txt 1 1 6.0 3.0 1.0 25 8.48

The format of the command to run PE-Planner is

./build/planner_px4 [map_file] [enable MPCC (disabled it to use PID for comparison)] [enable GPIO] [max velocity in Kinodynamic searching] [max acceleration in Kinodynamic searching] [mu] [number of tests] [value of disturbance force]

The value of disturbance force given is only used to set the disturbance in Gazebo simulation and is unknown to the planner.