# Robust and Efficient Quadrotor Trajectory Generation for Fast Autonomous Flight

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.01531 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01531/

## Key facts

- Cited by 41 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jul 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Learning High-Speed Flight in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05113/) (2021)
- [Autonomous Drone Racing with Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08624/) (2021)
- [Openfly: A comprehensive platform for aerial vision-language navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18041/) (2025)
- [What Is The Best 3D Scene Representation for Robotics? From Geometric to Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03422/) (2025)
- [Time-Optimal Planning for Quadrotor Waypoint Flight](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04537/) (2021)
- [Learning Perception-Aware Agile Flight in Cluttered Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01841/) (2022)
- [VLA-AN: An Efficient and Onboard Vision-Language-Action Framework for Aerial Navigation in Complex Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15258/) (2025)
- [Policy Search for Model Predictive Control with Application to Agile Drone Flight](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03850/) (2021)
- [Reducing Collision Checking for Sampling-Based Motion Planning Using Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08864/) (2022)
- [Real-Time Trajectory Planning for Autonomous Driving with Gaussian Process and Incremental Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11853/) (2022)
- [Learning Speed Adaptation for Flight in Clutter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04586/) (2024)
- [Vision Transformers for End-to-End Vision-Based Quadrotor Obstacle Avoidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10391/) (2024)
- [A Safer Vision-based Autonomous Planning System for Quadrotor UAVs with Dynamic Obstacle Trajectory Prediction and Its Application with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12893/) (2023)
- [Vision-based Learning for Drones: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05019/) (2023)
- [Vision-aided UAV navigation and dynamic obstacle avoidance using gradient-based B-spline trajectory optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07003/) (2022)
- [Learning Multi-Pursuit Evasion for Safe Targeted Navigation of Drones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03443/) (2023)
- [VisFly: An Efficient and Versatile Simulator for Training Vision-based Flight](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14783/) (2024)
- [Flying on Point Clouds with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00496/) (2025)
- [Connecting Deep-Reinforcement-Learning-based Obstacle Avoidance with Conventional Global Planners using Waypoint Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03663/) (2021)
- [AirHunt: Bridging VLM Semantics and Continuous Planning for Efficient Aerial Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12742/) (2026)
- [FM-Planner: Foundation Model Guided Path Planning for Autonomous Drone Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20783/) (2025)
- [SEA: Semantic Map Prediction for Active Exploration of Uncertain Areas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19766/) (2025)
- [Fly360: Omnidirectional Obstacle Avoidance within Drone View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06573/) (2026)
- [A Reactive Framework for Whole-Body Motion Planning of Mobile Manipulators Combining Reinforcement Learning and SDF-Constrained Quadratic Programmi](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23975/) (2025)
- [Casual3DHDR: Deblurring High Dynamic Range 3D Gaussian Splatting from Casually Captured Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17728/) (2025)
- [High-Speed Vision-Based Flight in Clutter with Safety-Shielded Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08653/) (2026)
- [Approximate Imitation Learning for Event-based Quadrotor Flight in Cluttered Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07578/) (2026)
- [NavRL++: A System-Level Framework for Improving Sim-to-Real Transfer in Reinforcement Learning-Based Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15559/) (2026)
- [From Distances to Trajectories: Real-Time Signed Distance Function Mapping and Distance-Accelerated Motion Planning for UAVs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19306/) (2026)
- [Identification and Avoidance of Static and Dynamic Obstacles on Point Cloud for UAVs Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06622/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we propose a robust and efficient quadrotor motion planning system for fast flight in 3-D complex environments. We adopt a kinodynamic path searching method to find a safe, kinodynamic feasible and minimum-time initial trajectory in the discretized control space. We improve the smoothness and clearance of the trajectory by a B-spline optimization, which incorporates gradient information from a Euclidean distance field (EDF) and dynamic constraints efficiently utilizing the convex hull property of B-spline. Finally, by representing the final trajectory as a non-uniform B-spline, an iterative time adjustment method is adopted to guarantee dynamically feasible and non-conservative trajectories. We validate our proposed method in various complex simulational environments. The competence of the method is also validated in challenging real-world tasks. We release our code as an open-source package.