E-Navi: Environmental Adaptive Navigation for UAVs on Resource Constrained Platforms

Abstract

The ability to adapt to changing environments is crucial for the autonomous navigation systems of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). However, existing navigation systems adopt fixed execution configurations without considering environmental dynamics based on available computing resources, e.g., with a high execution frequency and task workload. This static approach causes rigid flight strategies and excessive computations, ultimately degrading flight performance or even leading to failures in UAVs. Despite the necessity for an adaptive system, dynamically adjusting workloads remains challenging, due to difficulties in quantifying environmental complexity and modeling the relationship between environment and system configuration. Aiming at adapting to dynamic environments, this paper proposes E-Navi, an environmental-adaptive navigation system for UAVs that dynamically adjusts task executions on the CPUs in response to environmental changes based on available computational resources. Specifically, the perception-planning pipeline of UAVs navigation system is redesigned through dynamic adaptation of mapping resolution and execution frequency, driven by the quantitative environmental complexity evaluations. In addition, E-Navi supports flexible deployment across hardware platforms with varying levels of computing capability. Extensive Hardware-In-the-Loop and real-world experiments demonstrate that the proposed system significantly outperforms the baseline method across various hardware platforms, achieving up to 53.9% navigation task workload reduction, up to 63.8% flight time savings, and delivering more stable velocity control.