Fast-Racing: An Open-Source Strong Baseline for $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ Planning in Autonomous Drone Racing
Zhichao Han, Zhepei Wang, Neng Pan, Yi Lin, Chao Xu, Fei Gao
Abstract
With the autonomy of aerial robots advances in recent years, autonomous drone racing has drawn increasing attention. In a professional pilot competition, a skilled operator always controls the drone to agilely avoid obstacles in aggressive attitudes, for reaching the destination as fast as possible. Autonomous flight like elite pilots requires planning in <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathrm{SE}(3)$</tex-math></inline-formula> , whose non-triviality and complexity hindering a convincing solution in our community by now. To bridge this gap, this letter proposes an open-source baseline, which includes a high-performance <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathrm{SE}(3)$</tex-math></inline-formula> planner and a challenging simulation platform tailored for drone racing. We specify the <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathrm{SE}(3)$</tex-math></inline-formula> trajectory generation as a soft-penalty optimization problem, and speed up the solving process utilizing its underlying parallel structure. Moreover, to provide a testbed for challenging the planner, we develop delicate drone racing tracks which mimic real-world set-up and necessities planning in <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathrm{SE}(3)$</tex-math></inline-formula> . Besides, we provide necessary system components such as common map interfaces and a baseline controller, to make our work plug-in-and-use. With our baseline, we hope to future foster the research of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathrm{SE}(3)$</tex-math></inline-formula> planning and the competition of autonomous drone racing.