Design and Evaluation of Motion Planners for Quadrotors in Environments with Varying Complexities

Motion planning techniques for quadrotors have advanced significantly over the past decade. Most successful planners have two stages: a front-end that determines a path that incorporates geometric (or kinematic or input) constraints and specifies the homotopy class of the trajectory, and a back-end that optimizes this path to respect dynamics and input constraints. While there are many different choices for each stage, the eventual performance depends critically not only on these choices, but also on the environment. Given a new environment, it is difficult to decide