Time-Optimal Motion Primitives

In this project, I derived a time-optimal motion primitive (closed-form solution) for quadrotor trajectory planning in autonomous drone racing. The main idea is the following: 1) approximating the quadrotor as a point-mass model; 2) formulating the minimum-time problem as a constrained optimization problem, with both the acceleration and velocity as constraints; 3) solving the constrained problem using Pontryagin’s Maximum Principle. This motion primitive has been demonstrated to successfully push the drone to reach speeds up to 8 m/s and helped the team to rank second at the 2019 AlphaPilot Challenge.