Real-Time Optimal Trajectory Generation for a Quadrotor UAV on the Longitudinal Plane

This paper presents an optimal real-time Flight Management System (FMS) for quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) which minimizes a trade-off between costs associated with body acceleration and total time. The contribution of this paper is an optimal state feedback solution that considers the nonlinearities of the quadrotor's equations of motion. This solution is derived using the Pontryagin's Minimum Principle (PMP). Several simulations are presented including a plot of the Pareto optimal curve yielding a trade-off between the energy of the acceleration and the flight time.