Agile flight trajectory tracking through differential flatness

The trajectory planning and tracking problem in aerial vehicles with the constraints becomes highly-challenging due to the complexity of their dynamics. This paper focuses on a real-time agile flight trajectory generation methodology through differential flatness description. The differential flatness enables an effective dimension reduction, therefore, enables a real-time solution to the problem. The desired flat output is parametrized with b-spline and the control points of the splines are obtained through a sequential quadratic programming, which maximizes proximity of the b-spline curve to some predefined waypoints as well as smoothing at predefined level. Thus, trajectory tracking problem is translated into an optimization problem such that resulting optimal feasible trajectory meets all the given and dynamical constraints. For the simulation and validation purpose, we have shown application of this methodology to both fixed-wing and multi-rotor systems and compared their maneuvers for a given set of waypoints. Finally, through knot and control point insertion, real time trajectory re-planning is addressed.