  This paper studies the problem of fast and safe aerial payload transport by a
single quadcopter in urban areas. The quadcopter payload system (QPS) is
considered as a rigid body and modeled with a nonlinear dynamics. The urban
area is modeled as an obstacle-laden environment with obstacle geometries
obtained by incorporating realistic LIDAR data. Our approach for payload
transport is decomposed into high-level motion planning and low-level
trajectory control. For the low-level trajectory tracking, a feedback
linearization control is applied to stably track the desired trajectory of the
quadcopter. For high-level motion planning, we integrate A* search and
polynomial planning to define a safe trajectory for the quadcopter assuring
collision avoidance, boundedness of the quadcopter rotor speeds and tracking
error, and fast arrival to a target destination from an arbitrary initial
location.
