Onboard Operational Safety Filter for a Quadrotor in an Environment With Dynamic Obstacles

Abstract

Quadrotors have been applied to a wide range of industrial applications in recent years. It is vital to ensure the safety of a quadrotor operated by a human pilot in a practical environment that usually involves dynamic obstacles. This article develops an onboard Operational Safety Filter (OSF) for a quadrotor in an environment with dynamic obstacles. The developed OSF integrates motion prediction of dynamic obstacles and an improved backup controller into the existing backup controller-based OSF framework. The motion prediction of dynamic obstacles aims to address the dynamic obstacles. The improved backup controller can provide enhanced operational freedom for a quadrotor with respect to the existing backup controllers. The developed onboard OSF is applied to quadrotors in simulation and in the real world to evaluate its effectiveness in addressing dynamic obstacles, improving operational freedom, and running on a real quadrotor.