Some Modifications to Our End-to-End UAV Planner

Abstract

The one-stage planner YOPO maps a single depth image and the robot state directly to a set of candidate trajectories, trained by backpropagating through differentiable trajectory costs. This yields dense, geometrically informative supervision, but inherits the pathologies of soft-constrained optimization: the safety cost competes with the smoothness and goal-reaching terms, is non-convex across homotopy classes, and the single-piece polynomial is limited in expressiveness. In this report, we summarize several effective modifications. We adopt a two-piece MINCO parameterization, trading time for smoothness without altering the trajectory's spatial profile. We further lift YOPO's multi-modal prediction to span distinct homotopy classes, treating each motion primitive as a homotopy anchor that confines the trajectory to a feasible basin - without explicit safe-flight-corridor construction or front-end search. For dynamic feasibility, we impose barrier penalties on velocity and acceleration together with a curvature-dependent speed limit whose gradient acts only on the velocity, producing an adaptive-speed behavior that decelerates in cluttered regions or sharp turns. We replace score regression with a ranking loss, preventing small score errors from reordering the candidate set. These yield richer trajectory representations, safer obstacle avoidance, and more direct flight paths.