Configuration-Induced Passive Self-Rotation for Perception-Enhanced Autonomous Flight

Abstract:Autonomous flight in confined and cluttered environments is fundamentally limited by the restricted field of view (FoV) of onboard sensors. Passive self-rotation expands sensing coverage without additional sensors but introduces a tradeoff between swept-FoV refresh rate and flight performance. This letter presents a configuration-induced passively self-rotating tricopter for perception-enhanced autonomous flight. Firstly, the rear-arm configuration parameter is exploited to regulate the passive self-rotation operating point, providing an airframe-level mechanism for balancing swept-FoV refresh rate and flight performance. Secondly, a hierarchical autonomy framework integrating planning and control is developed to enable agile and robust autonomous flight under continuous passive self-rotation. For waypoint-based inspection, guide-point replanning is further used to improve task-level coverage. Extensive real-world experiments, including high-speed trajectory tracking, disturbance-rejection tests, and autonomous navigation in representative cluttered environments, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for perception-enhanced autonomous flight.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2607.17646 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2607.17646v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.17646 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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