News!

11/10/2018 – My article entitled “Flying on Point Clouds: Online Trajectory Generation and Autonomous Navigation for Quadrotor in Cluttered Environments” was accepted by Journal of Field Robotics (JFR).

20/9/2018 – I release a package for optimal time allocation for quadrotor trajectory. It can be applied to an arbitrary piecewise polynomial-based trajectory. Please check: TimeOptimizer

Bio

My name is Fei Gao (高飞) and I’m from China. The meaning of my name in Chinese is: flying high in the sky : )

I’m a Ph.D. candidate working on Aerial Robot in the UAV Group, RI, HKUST. I got my Bachelor degree in Control Science & Engineering from Zhejiang University. My research area includes motion planning, control, applied convex optimization, and swarm. I’m also interested in robotics exploration and autonomous aerial videography. You can check the following publication and video lists for details about each project.

Currently, the expected date of my Ph.D. graduation is Jul/Aug. 2019. After that, I’m eager to continue my academic career because of my interests and passions. So HRs please ignore me since I have no such a plan to enter into the job market.

I’m open to all possible faculty or post-doc or other research positions.

Source Code

GTOP: Gradient-Based Trajectory Optimizer by Fei Gao and Boyu Zhou.

A ROS-package for piecewise polynomial trajectory optimization written in C++. Details can be found in the related paper Gradient-Based Online Safe Trajectory Generation for Quadrotor Flight in Complex Environments.

Btraj: Bezier-Curve-Based Trajectory Generator by Fei Gao

Btraj is an online UAV planning framework used to generate safe, dynamically feasible trajectories in previous unknown environments. It can be divided as a front-end path finding module and a back-end trajectory optimization module. In the front-end, we provide two alternates: Fast Marching*(FM*) on a velocity field and A* on a pure grid map. A flight corridor consists of cubes are generated based on the path. In the back-end, we utilize properties of Bezier curve to confine the piecewise Bezier curves entirely within the corridor and dynamical limits. Details can be found in the related paper Online Safe Trajectory Generation For Quadrotors Using Fast Marching Method and Bernstein Basis Polynomial.

TimeOptimizer: Optimal Time Allocator for Quadrotor Trajectory by Fei Gao

TimeOptimizer is a tool to do re-timing (time optimization) of an arbitrary piecewise polynomial-based trajectory (no matter monomial polynomial, Bezier curve, B-spline or others). The objective of this work is to map the original parametrization variable to a new variable (time), with which the trajectory can finish as fast as possible and respect all kinodynamic limits (velocity, acceleration). Details can be found in the related paper Optimal Time Allocation for Quadrotor Trajectory Generation

More source code packages for other paper will be released soon.

Publication List

Online Quadrotor Trajectory Generation and Autonomous Navigation on Point Clouds, Fei Gao and Shaojie Shen, 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR 2016), Best Conference Paper Award.

Quadrotor trajectory generation in dynamic environments using semi-definite relaxation on nonconvex QCQP,  Fei Gao and Shaojie Shen, 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2017).

Real-time Monocular Dense Mapping on Aerial Robots Using Visual-Inertial Fusion, Zhenfei Yang, Fei Gao, and Shaojie Shen, 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2017).

Gradient-Based Online Safe Trajectory Generation for Quadrotor Flight in Complex Environments, Fei Gao, Yi Lin and Shaojie Shen, 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2017).

Autonomous Aerial Navigation Using Monocular Visual-Inertial Fusion, Yi Lin*, Fei Gao*, Tong Qin*, Wenliang Gao*, Tianbo Liu, William Wu, Zhenfei Yang and Shaojie Shen, ( * for equal contribution ), 2017, Journal of Field Robotics (JFR).

Collaborative Air-Ground Target Searching in Complex Environments, Changsheng Shen, Yuanzhao Zhang, Zimo Li, Fei Gao and Shaojie Shen, 2017 Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR 2017).

Online Safe Trajectory Generation For Quadrotors Using Fast Marching Method and Bernstein Basis Polynomial, Fei Gao, William WU, Yi Lin, Shaojie Shen, 2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2018). (Full Text)

ACT: An Autonomous Drone Cinematography System for Action Scenes, Chong Huang, Fei Gao, Jie Pan, Shaojie Shen, Kwang-Ting (Tim) Cheng et al, 2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2018).

A Collaborative Aerial-Ground Robotic System for Fast Exploration, Daqian Cheng*, Luqi Wang*, Fei Gao, Fengyu Cai, Jixin Guo, Mengxiang Lin, Shaojie Shen, 2018 International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER 2018).

Optimal Time Allocation for Quadrotor Trajectory Generation, Fei Gao, William Wu, Jie Pan, Boyu Zhou and Shaojie Shen, 2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2018). (Full Text)

Flying on Point Clouds: Online Trajectory Generation and Autonomous Navigation for Quadrotor in Cluttered Environments, Fei Gao, William Wu, Wenliang Gao and Shaojie Shen, 2018, Journal of Field Robotics (JFR).

Supplement Video

• Quadrotor Motion Planning Directly on Point Clouds (SSRR 2016 Best Paper)

• Point Clouds Planer Applied on a Monocular Dense Mapping System (ICRA 2017)

• Motion Planning in Dynamical Environments Using Semidefinite Relaxation on Nonconvex QCQP (ICRA 2017)

• Gradient-based Online Quadrotor Safe Trajectory Planning in Complex 3D Environments (IROS 2017)

• Autonomous Aerial Navigation Using Monocular Visual-Inertial Fusion (JFR 2017)

• UAV-UGV collaborative exploration, mapping, and pathfinding ( SSRR 2017 )

• Online Safe Trajectory Generation For Quadrotors Using Fast Marching Method and Bernstein Basis Polynomial (ICRA 2018)

• ACT: An Autonomous Drone Cinematography System for Action Scenes (ICRA 2018,  collaboration with UCSB Learning-Based Multimedia Lab)

• A Collaborative Aerial-Ground Robotic System for Fast Exploration

• Optimal Time Allocation for Quadrotor Trajectory Generation (IROS 2018, to appear)

• Flying on Point Clouds: Online Trajectory Generation and Autonomous Navigation for Quadrotor in Cluttered Environments

Teaching

Teaching Assistant at:

• ELEC 1110: Introduction to Electro-Robot Design (Under-Graduate/2016 Spring)
• ELEC 6910P: Introduction to Aerial Robotics (Post-Graduate/2016 Fall)
• ELEC 1110: Introduction to Electro-Robot Design (Under-Graduate/2017 Spring)