[Submitted on 23 Sep 2026]
Title:OA-MPPI: Occlusion-Aware Model Predictive Path Integral Control for UAV Flight
View a PDF of the paper titled OA-MPPI: Occlusion-Aware Model Predictive Path Integral Control for UAV Flight, by Vittorio Palladino and 3 other authors
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Abstract:Autonomous UAV flight through cluttered and partially unknown environments requires reasoning not only about observed obstacles but also about occluded regions that the sensor cannot observe. We present OA-MPPI, an obstacle- and occlusion-aware extension of Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control for quadrotor flight that accounts for potential moving agents emerging from these regions into the vehicle's path. At every planning step, we extract a 3D occlusion boundary from the online occupancy map and use it to model the regions that hidden agents could reach over the prediction horizon. We penalize trajectories that enter these expanding regions within MPPI rollouts generated using nonlinear quadrotor dynamics and accounting for individual rotor thrust limits. We validate the proposed approach in simulation and hardware flight experiments, with the complete pipeline running onboard the vehicle in real time. Results show increased clearance from occlusion boundaries compared to baseline MPPI in both settings, as well as avoidance of an agent emerging from occlusion in simulation.
Comments: 8 pages, 6 figures
Subjects:
Robotics (cs.RO)
Cite as: arXiv:2609.28709 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2609.28709v1 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.28709
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Vittorio Palladino [view email] [v1] Wed, 23 Sep 2026 18:46:13 UTC (1,444 KB)
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