Minimum-Energy Trajectory Generation for Quadrotor UAVs Using Basis Functions and Gradient-Based Optimization
Fabio CELANI, Dennis LUCARELLI
Abstract. A quadrotor Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) consumes considerable energy in its rotors. Due to the limited payload of the UAV, the on-board batteries are small and have limited capacity. Thus, generating minimum-energy trajectories is of great importance to increase quadrotor UAV flight time. This work proposes a novel method for generating optimal energy trajectories for a quadrotor UAV subject to spatial constraints. The objective is to drive the vehicle from an initial hovering condition to a desired final hovering condition, flying within assigned boundaries and avoiding obstacles, while minimizing the energy expended by the rotors. In this work the quadrotor thrusts are expressed as linear combinations of orthonormal basis functions, and the trajectory planning problem is formulated as an optimization problem in which the weights of the basis expansion are the decision variables. The proposed approach is validated by a numerical example in which the optimization problem is solved by using a gradient-based local optimization algorithm with the gradients computed by employing the differentiable programming technique.
Keywords
Trajectory Optimization, Quadrotor UAV, Minimum Energy, Slepian Sequences, Differentiable Programming
Published online 7/20/2026, 6 pages
Copyright © 2026 by the author(s)
Published under license by Materials Research Forum LLC., Millersville PA, USA
Citation: Fabio CELANI, Dennis LUCARELLI, Minimum-Energy Trajectory Generation for Quadrotor UAVs Using Basis Functions and Gradient-Based Optimization, Materials Research Proceedings, Vol. 69, pp 78-83, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21741/9781644904251-14
The article was published as article 14 of the book CEAS – AIDAA Conference 2025
Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
References
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