# Bubble Planner: Planning High-speed Smooth Quadrotor Trajectories using Receding Corridors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.12177 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12177/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 24 Feb 2022.

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [FAST-LIVO2: Fast, Direct LiDAR-Inertial-Visual Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14035/) (2024)
- [Flying on Point Clouds with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00496/) (2025)
- [A GP-based Robust Motion Planning Framework for Agile Autonomous Robot Navigation and Recovery in Unknown Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01617/) (2024)
- [Towards autonomous photogrammetric forest inventory using a lightweight under-canopy robotic drone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12073/) (2025)
- [Towards Task-Oriented Flying: Framework, Infrastructure, and Principles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15129/) (2025)
- [From Distances to Trajectories: Real-Time Signed Distance Function Mapping and Distance-Accelerated Motion Planning for UAVs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19306/) (2026)
- [Decision Transformer-Based Drone Trajectory Planning with Dynamic Safety-Efficiency Trade-Offs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21506/) (2025)
- [CORB-Planner: Corridor as Observations for RL Planning in High-Speed Flight](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11240/) (2025)
- [Zero-Shot UAV Navigation in Forests via Relightable 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07101/) (2026)
- [ScanDP: Generalizable 3D Scanning with Diffusion Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10390/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Quadrotors are agile platforms. With human experts, they can perform extremely high-speed flights in cluttered environments. However, fully autonomous flight at high speed remains a significant challenge. In this work, we propose a motion planning algorithm based on the corridor-constrained minimum control effort trajectory optimization (MINCO) framework. Specifically, we use a series of overlapping spheres to represent the free space of the environment and propose two novel designs that enable the algorithm to plan high-speed quadrotor trajectories in real-time. One is a sampling-based corridor generation method that generates spheres with large overlapped areas (hence overall corridor size) between two neighboring spheres. The second is a Receding Horizon Corridors (RHC) strategy, where part of the previously generated corridor is reused in each replan. Together, these two designs enlarge the corridor spaces in accordance with the quadrotor's current state and hence allow the quadrotor to maneuver at high speeds. We benchmark our algorithm against other state-of-the-art planning methods to show its superiority in simulation. Comprehensive ablation studies are also conducted to show the necessity of the two designs. The proposed method is finally evaluated on an autonomous LiDAR-navigated quadrotor UAV in woods environments, achieving flight speeds over 13.7 m/s without any prior map of the environment or external localization facility.