Outdoor navigation of millimeter-wave radar quadrotors based on optimal virtual tube

doi:10.23919/JSEE.2025.000099

Journal of Systems Engineering and Electronics ›› 2025, Vol. 36 ›› Issue (4): 1057-1067.doi: 10.23919/JSEE.2025.000099

• CONTROL THEORY AND APPLICATION • Previous Articles

Outdoor navigation of millimeter-wave radar quadrotors based on optimal virtual tube

Delong WU(), Hao FANG(), Yiren HAO(), Aobo WANG()

School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China

Received:2024-04-01 Online:2025-08-18 Published:2025-09-04
Contact: Hao FANG E-mail:hydrogen2000@163.com;fangh@bit.edu.cn;haoyiren2021@163.com;wabisme@163.com
About author:
WU Delong was born in 2000. He received his B.S. degree in automation engineering from Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China, in 2022. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. degree in control science and engineering at the School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology. His research interests include autonomous aerial robots, trajectory planning, and control. E-mail: hydrogen2000@163.com

FANG Hao was born in 1973. He received his B.S. degree from Xi’an University of Technology in 1995 and Ph.D. degree from Xi’an Jiaotong University in 2002. Since 2011, he has been a professor with Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China. His research interests are multi-agent system, autonomous robot, and distributed simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). E-mail: fangh@bit.edu.cn

HAO Yiren was born in 2000. He received his B.S. degree in automation from the Northwestern Polytechnical University, in 2022. He is currently pursuing his master’s degree at the School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology. His research interests include depth estimation and visual relocalization. E-mail: haoyiren2021@163.com

WANG Aobo was born in 1999. He received his B.S. degree in automation from Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China, in 2021. He is currently pursuing his master’s degree in the School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology. His research interests are visual simultaneous localization and mapping, object-oriented simultaneous localization and mapping, and semantic scene understanding. E-mail: wabisme@163.com
Supported by:
This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2022YFA1004703) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (62088101).

Abstract

Abstract:

This paper presents a quadcopter system for navigation in outdoor urban environments. The main contributions include the hardware design, the establishment of global occupancy grid maps based on millimeter-wave radars, the trajectory planning scheme based on optimal virtual tube methods, and the controller structure based on dynamics. The proposed system focuses on utilizing a compact and lightweight quadrotor with sensors to achieve navigation that conforms to the direction of urban roads with high computational efficiency and safety. Our work is an application of millimeter-wave radars and virtual tube planning for obstacle avoidance in navigation. The validness and effectiveness of the proposed system are verified by experiments.

Key words: quadrotor navigation, obstacle avoidance, millimeter-wave radar, virtual tube planning

Delong WU, Hao FANG, Yiren HAO, Aobo WANG. Outdoor navigation of millimeter-wave radar quadrotors based on optimal virtual tube[J]. Journal of Systems Engineering and Electronics, 2025, 36(4): 1057-1067.

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Hardware	Detail
Intel NUC11TNHi7	Intel i7-1165G7 117 mm×112 mm×54 mm, 567 g
Holybro Pixhawk 6C mini	STM32H743, BMI055 38 mm×55 mm×15.5 mm, 37.2 g
Nanoradar MR72	0.2−80 m, $ 112^\circ $×$ 14^\circ $ 100 mm×57 mm×16.5 mm, 15.3 g
T-motor F40Pro IV	2 400 kV, 1.448 kg Φ27.9 mm×29.8 mm, 30.6 g

End point/m	v_max/(m/s)	Flight time/s	Tracking error/cm	Collision or not
500, 0	3.26	367	5.09	×
500, −500	3.21	617	5.51	×
0, −500	3.36	392	5.59	×
−500, −500	3.33	644	5.33	×
−500, 0	3.53	356	3.80	×
−500, 500	3.79	647	5.10	×
0, 500	3.13	351	6.47	×
500, 500	3.69	669	5.35	×
Average	3.41	−	5.28	×

[1]	Xiuxia YANG, Yi ZHANG, Weiwei ZHOU. Obstacle avoidance method of three-dimensional obstacle spherical cap [J]. Journal of Systems Engineering and Electronics, 2018, 29(5): 1058-1068.
[2]	Jingliang Sun and Chunsheng Liu. Optimal obstacle avoidance via distributed consensus algorithms with communication delay [J]. Journal of Systems Engineering and Electronics, 2016, 27(6): 1272-1282.

Outdoor navigation of millimeter-wave radar quadrotors based on optimal virtual tube

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