Autonomous Flights Inside Narrow Tunnels
- DOI码：10.1109/TRO.2025.3548525
- 发表刊物：IEEE Transactions on Robotics
- 摘要：Multirotors are usually desired to enter confined narrow tunnels that are barely accessible to humans in various applications including inspection, search and rescue, and so on. This task is extremely challenging since the lack of geometric features and illuminations, together with the limited field of view, cause problems in perception; the restricted space and significant ego airflow disturbances induce control issues. This article introduces an autonomous aerial system designed for navigation through tunnels as narrow as 0.5 m in diameter. The real-time and online system includes a virtual omni-directional perception module tailored for the mission and a novel motion planner that incorporates perception and ego airflow disturbance factors modeled using camera projections and computational fluid dynamics analyses, respectively. Extensive flight experiments on a custom-designed quadrotor are conducted in multiple realistic narrow tunnels to validate the superior performance of the system, even over human pilots, proving its potential for real applications. In addition, a deployment pipeline on other multirotor platforms is outlined and open-source packages are provided for future developments.
- 合写作者：Yang Xu,Peize Liu,Hongming Chen,Yan Ning,Shaojie Shen
- 第一作者：Luqi Wang
- 论文类型：期刊论文
- 通讯作者：Hao Xu,Ximin Lyu
- 是否译文：否
