Learning Long-Horizon Predictions for Quadrotor Dynamics

Accurate modeling of system dynamics is crucial for achieving high-performance planning and control of robotic systems. Although existing data-driven approaches represent a promising approach for modeling dynamics, their accuracy is limited to a short prediction horizon, overlooking the impact of compounding prediction errors over longer prediction horizons. Strategies to mitigate these cumulative errors remain underex- plored. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we study the key design choices for efficiently learning long-horizon prediction dynamics for quadrotors. Specifically, we analyze the impact of multiple architectures, historical data, and multi-step loss formulation. We show that sequential modeling techniques showcase their advantage in minimizing compounding errors compared to other types of solutions. Furthermore, we propose a novel decoupled dynamics learning approach, which further simplifies the learning process while also enhancing the approach modu- larity. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on real-world quadrotor data demonstrate the versatility and precision of the proposed approach. Our outcomes offer several insights and methodologies for enhancing long-term predictive accuracy of learned quadrotor dynamics for planning and control. SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL Video: https://youtu.be/MPUJunMD11U Code: https://github.com/arplaboratory/long-horizon-dynam ics